Unified Patents and Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) are pleased to announce the winning prior art submissions in the first ever Cloud Native Heroes Challenge, a patent troll bounty program, in which prizes exceeding $5,000 were awarded to winners from 3 different continents. The results of this contest demonstrate the benefits of engaging open source developers and technologists with domain expertise in the fight against patent trolls.
This first challenge sought prior art that can be used to challenge U.S. Patent 11,695,823, owned and asserted by Edge Networking Systems LLC, an NPE and entity affiliated with Blue Wave IP, Inc. The challenged patent relates to a network architecture that facilitates secure and flexible programmability between a user device and across a network with full lifecycle management of services and infrastructure applications. The patent has been asserted against Microsoft and Amazon.
The 1st place winning prior art is U.S. Patent 9,489,647, which describes a system and method for a cloud computing abstraction, filed just a few months before the challenged patent. Like the challenged patent, it allows for the use of APIs.
Emídio de Paiva Neto and Chris Buccella tied for 2nd place for describing technology developed within OpenStack, an open-source cloud operating system that allows users to manage and build cloud computing platforms.
We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone and offer tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.
WINNING PATENT SUBMISSION
WINNING OPENSTACK DOCS
Find more information on CNCF and the prior art challenges within the links below: