Posts Tagged: "Blackbird Technologies"

“One thing that I find curious is that Cloudflare claims to have 150 patent assets on the same type of technology,” Verlander said. Such assets include U.S. Patent No. 9342620, titled Loading of Web Resources, and U.S. Patent No. 9369437, entitled Internet-Based Proxy Method to Modify Internet Responses. “It seems to me that Cloudflare should be quite concerned. If the technology covered by the ‘335 patent isn’t patent-eligible, all of Cloudflare’s patent assets may be worthless and I imagine that their investors must be worried about that. They may have won the battle but they could lose the war because if they’re correct, competitors could jump right into the market and copy Cloudflare’s technology.”

Fortune tech writer Jeff John Roberts, who penned this particular article, regurgitates Cloudflare’s claims that Blackbird “may be engaging in illegal fee-splitting arrangements with patent owners” simply because it is run by people who have experience as patent litigators. It’s true that Blackbird is staffed with many lawyers coming from leading firms in patent law like Fish & Richardson and Kirkland & Ellis, but Blackbird is asserting the patents on their own behalf. Although the patent owner gets a share of the revenues from patent assertion, there is nothing unethical about the arrangement. Because Blackbird is not a law firm and does not receive fees, there are no fees to split. But don’t tell that to the editorial staff at Fortune. They apparently don’t want something like fact to get in the way of a fake, juicy patent troll narrative that makes patent owners look like villains.