Hacker News Reader

Comment by NikolaNovak | Hacker News Reader

I've read the article but I'm not sure I understand :

1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else?

2. There were 4 patents brought up against cloud flare, but sable gave up "its entire portfolio". Does that mean these 4 were their entire portfolio? Or did they have to give up patents outside of suit itself? If so, how and why? Did sable hang up the hat as a business?

View on HN

Reading between the lines, my uneducated guess is that Sable knew they were going out of business either way and had to chose between paying ALL of Cloudflare's legal fees (possibly in the millions) or paying a token amount and giving up their (now or soon-to-be worthless) patents. The latter results in fewer financial loses for Sable and makes for excellent Cloudflare PR.

Edit: Also, it's entirely likely that Sable still made a tidy profit overall when it settled with the other big networking companies and decided to quit while they were ahead.

That's what I thought, too

More importantly, this deal allows them to avoid bankruptcy proceedings.

In the worst case, a bankruptcy could end up clawing back any "tidy profits" that were previously paid out to company owners.

There's a picture of the "Dedication to the Public and Royalty Free License Agreement between Sable and Cloudflare" at the end of the article. [1]

Not a lawyer, but it seems to be part of the court ruling. Maybe CF didn't see a chance to get their costs back and made a deal so Sable needed to only pay a part, but also release the patents?

[1] https://cf-assets.www.cloudflare.com/slt3lc6tev37/4rpPZkNJBZ...

Sable's patents are from a company that stopped operations in 2006, so most patents are probably from well before then, and likely either expired or will very soon.

>1. Why / how did sable give up its patent portfolio? It's handwaved as "lots of post trial stuff" but what's the nutshell of it? Is it because they're marked invalid? Is it punitive ruling? Something else?

Great Q and I don't know the answer. My best guess from the article is that Sable effectively agreed to settle rather than continue with post-trial legal procedures (whatever those are) that would have been necessary:

>A jury verdict is not the end of the road in a patent case ... there are post-trial motions, appeals, and other procedural hurdles to jump through before a case is truly over. Tired from the fight, and smarting from its loss, Sable decided it wanted to throw in the towel and end the fight once and for all.

Did Sable give up ALL its patents, or only the patents involved in the Cloudflare case? The picture of the document refers to the "Sable Patents", which I would suspect are defined in the context of the court case and therefore are only the ones relevant to that case?

I read it as “giving up the patents in the portfolio that they acquired from that other company in 2006”.

Still not very clear to me either. Probably intentional, since CF seems to want to send the message that “mess with us and in the end you’ll give up all your patents somehow”

Could it be that the Cloudflare victory would basically give anyone in the future a very strong case to fight Sable with?

And so this portfolio of patents has lost most of its value because of that?

Maybe Cloudflare agreed to reduced damages in exchange for this?

I agree it's unclear.

Take a look at the legal doctrine of collateral estoppel. Once a party gets its day in court on a specific issue of fact, it can't keep relitigating that issue in later legal actions. It's possible that Cloudflare was the first to take Sable's claims all the way to a verdict (versus settling early), so Sable might have finally gotten its day in court.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_estoppel

Reply on news.ycombinator.com