On November 13, 2024, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) announced the Cloud Native Heroes Challenge at their KubeCon+CloudNativeCon North America 2024 conference. This challenge will be a series of crowdsourced prior art contests utilizing Unified Patents’ PATROLL website. To learn more, visit www.cncf.io/heroes and read about the inaugural contest here.

PATROLL is the world’s first crowd-sourced prior art contest forum where Unified Patents puts a monetary bounty on PAE- and NPE-owned patents. We engage the general public to submit prior art to improve overall patent quality. All submissions are reviewed by Unified's legal team to identify winning prior art, and we provide the invalidity claim chart to the world on the PATROLL portal.

CNCF is co-hosting this program with Unified Patents, the Linux Foundation’s partner in patent troll deterrence since 2019. Unified Patents is the only organization that uses offensive community-driven strategies to deter patent trolls.

Find more information on CNCF and the inaugural challenge within the links below: