> I do worry that a future more sinister malicious patent troll could read all the wonderful strategy
The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not attract people who are interested in anything approaching due diligence.
But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls to leave Cloudflare alone, right? This is a very deliberate strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ... but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."
I was wondering if Cisco or Juniper payed them anything to back off or just threaten them the same thing that Cloudflare actually did to them.
The fact that they thought they had a winnable case again Cloudflare makes me think that others actually paid up ... or that the troll was just getting desperate to finally earn anything.
I don't agree its always a get-rich-quick scheme, it can also be seen as a passive income stream. Its just another example of parasitic rent-seeking on which our economy is based.
They basically have a stranglehold on patents for haptic feedback in gaming for some unfathomable reason and they will have it for the foreseeable future.
The "good" news is that patent trolling is, more or less by definition, a get-rich-quick scheme - they want to make a lot of money by sending a few dozen letters every year. It does not attract people who are interested in anything approaching due diligence.
But also, the whole point of all of this is to get the trolls to leave Cloudflare alone, right? This is a very deliberate strategy; this announcement says "don't try that stuff here ... but feel free to try Cisco or Juniper instead."