That is on topic - it was used as a generic reference to large-screen movies, rather than those specifically manufactured by the IMAX corporation.

That said, it doesn't quite fall under dilution (the Federal Trademark Anti-Dilution Act, amending the Lanham Act to not require evidence of actual confusion for trademark infringement), because, as others have noted, it's not a trademark use in commerce (and no, merely mentioning a word in a magazine is not going to always be a use of that word in commerce, if you're not using it to sell anything). The GP has confused dilution and genericide, the latter of which is a legitimate concern for the IMAX corp. If "IMAX" becomes a generic term for any large format movie, they'll lose their trademark right. This is different from dilution, which would be, for example, someone selling giant genetically engineered apples as "IMAX-sized apples" or selling 12" dildoes as "IMAX-dildoes". Even though there's no possibility anyone would think the IMAX company was behind those, it would serve to dilute the distinctiveness of their mark.

I was getting robocalls multiple times a day ("Hi, this is Rachel from Card Services!" or "[foghorn] All aboard for the S.S. Takeyourmoney!" or "Stop! Do not hang up! The FBI wants you to protect your identity with Identity Block!") until I installed Facebook's Hello app. I can't speak to its primary contact functions, as most of my friends don't bother putting their phone numbers into Facebook, but it has one neat feature: "Automatically block calls from numbers that have been blocked by a lot of other people."

I turned that on, and the calls dried up. Haven't had one in weeks.

I think the existence of GamerGate shows that this is not anything unique to women.

Perhaps you should re-read it, considering that there's a lawyer on the other side that's taking Prenda down.

That's because before someone goes to jail, you have to have a trial and a conviction. And while Prenda's cases have been dismissed with prejudice, and they've had to pay damages and fines for sanctions, they haven't been criminally charged. You know, for someone whining about lawyers, you sure don't know much about the legal system.

This also isn't a win for him, yet... It's getting remanded back to the appeals court (and possibly, eventually back to the trial court), and so his fight isn't over. On retrial, a jury could still convict him by finding that he actually did intend to threaten his ex when he sent her a facebook post saying that her restraining order wouldn't protect her from a bullet, rather than just that a reasonable person would interpret it to be a threat.

If they did that, the provisional application would never be published or open to public inspection, so it would be useless to prevent a troll from getting a patent on the same technology.

Looking at the people here calling for blood, do you think such an announcement would be taken without a grain of salt? There's nothing binding in an announcement.

They did file in the name of the actual inventors. If you click the links, they're by John Resig and Joel Burget.

That's not true at all. The only thing that "first to file" changes from "first to invent" is interference practices: previously, if Alice and Bob both filed patent applications for the same exact invention, they would go onto an interference, which is like a mini-litigation, to determine which of them actually conceived of the invention first. They cost between $20-50k for each party, and there were on average about 20 per year... out of over half a million patent applications filed each year. Under the new system, it's just a question of who filed their application first.

First to file has literally nothing to do with prior art. And prior art that was never patented absolutely matters - white papers, scientific journals, product literature, etc. can be and are all used as prior art, even under the first to file system.

Claim 1 has legal weight, unlike the abstract. You can tell it's a claim because it starts with a number, is a single sentence, and is in the section that starts "I claim" or "we claim" or "what is claimed is", rather than the section that says "Abstract".

Well, yes, most improvements in technologies draw inspiration from earlier technologies. The Tesla Roadster draws inspiration from the Model T. The Boeing Dreamliner draws inspiration from the P51 Mustang. Windows 10 draws inspiration from Microsoft Bob. The question isn't "was this inspired by something earlier" but "is this obvious in view of what came earlier?"

Also known as "published normally". Patent applications are typically published 18 months after their filing date. There's nothing "quiet" about it - it's included in the official gazette each Tuesday and Google Patents (among other services) take an image of it. But it's a nice attempt by Subby to imply that there's a dark conspiracy here.

This appears to be a reference to the 20-person pro bono committee at Wilson Sonsini. Most law firms have pro bono committees of partners in charge of selecting and approving pro bono work, which is then taken on by junior associates. The committee itself doesn't do the work, so no, they didn't have a "pro bono team of 20+". They probably had a supervising attorney, a patent agent, and a paralegal, donating probably around 50 hours total for the two applications.

They can also be filed before the public disclosure. They're inexpensive placeholders that you can file without paying fees for search and examination. If you don't file the nonprovisional application within one year, the provisional expires and disappears forever, so they're particularly a good thing for startups who don't have revenue yet.

That's the abstract of the patent. It has no legal weight and is only there to aid in searching through patents.

Yeah. That patent has no patent term adjustment, as I said.

Nothing, because those patents don't get patent term adjustment. And while, yes, there are still a few patent applications floating around from that era, that law was changed 20 years ago. It's already been taken care of for everything since then, and since you can't apply it retroactively, there's nothing more that can be done.

Except for the fact that that never, ever happens.
Seriously, find me a patent that has 19 years of patent term adjustment. Here's an article discussing how almost 100% of patents that get granted do so within 4 years, with the very longest outlier being 6 years.

Add to this the fact that the "good faith belief" is a really low bar, and simply means you found an amenable patent attorney to draft an invalidity opinion letter for you. If they're right, the patent is invalid and you owe nothing. If they're wrong - under the previous state of the law - you believed it was invalid and didn't intend to infringe and owe nothing.
Which basically boils down to, "pay an attorney $10k for an opinion memo, and get out of infringement scot free." It's a good loophole to close.

Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney and have done opinion letters. Mine were totally legit, though.

Probably not... as noted elsewhere, only the damages on the registered and unregistered trade dress were struck, while the damages on the patent infringement were upheld. The jury verdict form doesn't break down damages by patents vs. trade dress, but there were 7 patents that Samsung was found to infringe (5, willfully, which triples the damages); and there was only one trade dress registration and one unregistered trade dress that were shown to be protectable... and many of Samsung's devices were found to infringe the patents but not either of the trade dress claims, so it's not even going to be as big as a 2/9 reduction.

For example, take the Samsung Epic 4G, which the jury counted as $130.1M in damages. It infringed all but one of the patents, but wasn't found to infringe either the unregistered or registered trade dress. So this judgement won't reduce that award by a penny. Same thing for any of the Samsung Galaxy S II models other than the Showcase, which collectively are $250M.