This has been the case for trade marks for years. If you do not use a trade mark, your registration can be invalidated. The use has to be "bona fide" and there is a requirement of good faith for the registration to be valid in the first place. This legally prevents "parking" of trade marks, but present no obstacle to genuine trade mark users. This, and the higher application fees, keep the trade mark system free from becoming clogged up.

It is only the claims that matter - the rest is normally irrelevant to anyone!

It is quite a narrow patent that seems to be looking to provide a spoof internet connection to wireless devices when the can connect to the claimed device but there is no available Internet connection.

I have no idea how anyone could possibly infringe this patent, given that the last-but-two and last-but-one clauses of claim 1 are virtually unintelligible. The later independent claims are even stranger and more obscure.

IAAL!

(But as a patent attorney in Europe, I think that the USPTO and US patent law is strangely weird and broken.)

The quote missed out the words "what felt like" before the description of the "weapon".

How, exactly, does the feel of an automatic gun (as applied to the back of one's head) differ from that of a pointed stick?

Here in the UK, we are in the midst of a fear-of-crime epidemic, NOT a crime epidemic

A