When Groupon decided to launch a new product with the name of Gnome they either forgot to check if it was already a registered trademark, or simply didn’t care that it already was.  The “GNOME” has been a registered trademark since 2008, and has been known a known name in software for the last 17 years.

The GNOME Foundation recently found itself in an odd situation when Groupon (NASDAQ:GRPN) decided to roll out a new tablet based point of sale solution for merchants.  Groupon somehow came up with the name of GNOME for the products. For the last 17 years GNOME been a name known in software, as it has been a desktop environment environment for GNU/Linum and BSD operating systems.  This has been a staple for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and SUSE Linux Enterprise Server distrobutions.  It is also the go to the desktop environment for many other distros.  With the recognition that it had, it is surprising that nobody thought there was a problem before Groupon made 28 trademark applications even with a simple web search.

The GNOME Foundation reached out to Gropon to request that they pick another name.  The reasoning behind that was that Groupon was trying to use the name on something so closely related to the GNOME desktop and its technology.  Groupon refused to reconsider the name, and even filed more trademark applications after they received the request.  So the foundation decided to file formal proceedings to oppose 10 of the trademark applications by December 3rd 2014.  They also made an appeal to the public to help raise funds to fight Groupon, as its counsel advised them it would need $80,00 to do so,  This is a bit like David taking on Goliath as the foundation is a non-profit and Groupon is a multi-billion dollar company.  The foundation raised $87,693.47  to cover its costs.

When the media picked up on this after the foundation made the appeal, they gained a lot of support.  They received so much that Groupon backed down and abandoned all of the 28 pending trademark applications.  This was confirmed after the foundation made an update to its website where it made the appeal to the public.  Groupon has agreed to change the name of its new product, and the foundation thanks its supporters for this outcome.  This is just another gleaming example of the little guy standing up for itself and winning.

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Now, Nvidia says that when it filed its suits against Qualcomm and Samsung in Delaware District Court and with the ITC that it fully expected it would be sued in response. The company said in filings: “It’s a predictable tactic.” Nvidia continues saying that it was not surprised to see that Samsung had filed a lawsuit against them earlier this week and had included Velocity Micro, a ‘small’ customer of Nvidia’s based in Virginia (where the Samsung suit was filed).

Nvidia then goes on to talk about the claims that Samsung has made about infringed upon patents and performance claims, but says it is not ready yet to formally respond to Samsung’s lawsuit. However, it appears ready to respond to Samsung’s claims about false marketing claims regarding the Shield tablet and the Tegra K1 SoC. We already addressed these performance claims by Samsung, stating that the Exynos SoC in the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 was actually faster than Nvidia’s SHIELD tablet with the Tegra K1 SoC, and we really couldn’t find any industry standard benchmarks that corroborated Samsung’s story. But Nvidia went much further and decided to run a dozen or two benchmarks side by side and out of the box against the Galaxy Note 4 with the SHIELD tablet and posted their results in a graph.

Nvidia SHIELD vs Galaxy Note 4

As you can see, Nvidia’s SoC and tablet handily beat the Samsung Galaxy Note 4 handily in most tests, so there’s really no question that Samsung’s claims of Nvidia’s false marketing claims are fairly baseless as we had stated earlier.

Nvidia continues, stating that Samsung’s suing of Velocity Micro is unfortunate, especially considering how small Velocity Micro is. Nvidia states that Samsung is trying to keep their lawsuit in Virginia because they have a faster time to trial than most other jurisdictions in the US. Nvidia ends the posting with a caution, “It can be a dangerous strategy for one of the largest companies on the planet to decide to sue one of the smallest companies in all of Virginia. Samsung’s action does not change our analysis, or our determination. Our patent lawsuit in the ITC is moving forward and remains a far more serious problem for them.”

We have the full documentation, including the Samsung filing posted below if you’d like to read it.

Samsung v Nvidia in Virginia

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Fourteen years after Intel (NASDAQ: INTC) found itself mired in a scandal involving fixed benchmarks for its Pentium 4, customers who purchased one of the chips between November 20, 2000 and June 30, 2002 are now eligible for a $15 refund based upon a proposed settlement from a long-running class action suit against the company.

Back in the early 2000s, Intel’s dominance of the x86 market wasn’t as entirely clear cut as it was today. AMD (NYSE: AMD) was a much more formidable competitor in the space than it is today, and its Athlon chips at the time gave Intel’s Willamette architecture a serious run for its money. In fact, AMD’s advantage was so great that Intel resorted to cooking benchmark numbers — or so the suit against the company alleges — to close the gap.

According to court documents, when Intel discovered its silicon had “pervasive design flaws” and “dismal” performance scores on benchmarks Intel simply rewrote the rules of the game. WebMark 2001 and SYSMark 2001 — which Intel claimed were developed independently — were tweaked to give the Pentium 4 and advantage over its AMD rivals.  Back in 2001 AnandTech caught wind of this, claiming then that Sysmark 2001’s reliance on Windows Media Encoder, which had issues properly detecting if AMD’s chips supported SSE, was part of the problem. The court documents, however, have much more stern and legal jargon ridden language.

“Intel used its enormous resources and influence in the computing industry to, in Intel’s own words, ‘falsely improve’ the Pentium 4’s performance scores. It secretly wrote benchmark tests that would give the Pentium 4 higher scores, then released and marketed these ‘new’ benchmarks to performance reviewers as ‘independent third-party’ benchmarks,” the class action report says.

The class action settlement is limited to customers that reside in the United States.

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In the company’s continued efforts of not agreeing to settle with any patent trolls, Newegg has once again defeated a patent troll in partnership with GEICO to fight off BS patents and patent claims. In a blog post titled, Patent Trolls, They Fold Like a Cheap Suit When Faced With Trial, Newegg’s Chief Legal Officer,Lee Cheng talked about the company’s latest run in with a patent troll from the mecca of patent trolls, East Texas. The litigant, Macrosolve, started this series of litigation in 2011 with a filing of more than 75 lawsuits in the Eastern District of Texas against companies from all different types of industries. They claimed that these companies were distributing electronic forms over the internet or to mobile devices and then collection reviews and the responses would be liable for patent infringement. And as Newegg’s Lee Cheng states, with such a broad definition, virtually no company is safe from such a ridiculous patent.

Because Macrosolve is a patent troll, their plan was to sue a dozen or two companies at a time and offer them to settle. These settlements netted Macrosolve more than $4 million in settlements, while Newegg and GEICO held out and fought back. This is primarily because most companies’ lawyer fees if they were to go to court would be greater than if they were able to agree to a settlement. This mentality and legal climate is what enables these patent trolls to continue to exist and extort companies of all sizes. However, many of these patent trolls go after companies that they believe will settle rather than take them to court.

Lee Cheng also stated, “In a sense, we are disappointed because we were robbed of an opportunity to prove in court that Macrosolve was and is nothing more than a serial, shameless abuser of patent rights, with a poor-quality patent that has not even survived its first reexamination. Macrosolve failed to create products and services that real customers found valuable, whose principals decided to turn it into a corporate parasite. It is not a coincidence that faced with its first real opposition in Newegg and Geico, Macrosolve folded like a cheap suit, and dismissed its lawsuits against all defendants.” He continued, “I could never figure out how Macrosolve would not be required to publicly and timely disclose the fact that its primary asset, the ‘816 Patent,’ was the subject of a final rejection in reexamination or that it dismissed almost all pending lawsuits with prejudice. What was most bizarre was how Macrosolve’s stock price traded up the day that the USPTO issued the final rejection of the ‘816 Patent’. Curious. Definitely worth someone’s attention.”

So, even though the court dismissed all of Macrosolve’s claims against Newegg, Newegg still itends to seek all of its fees and costs against Macrosolve for abusive litigation tactics. However, because of the way of how these patent trolls are created and maintained, even if Newegg were to win these claims of fees and costs against the patent troll they would simply file for bankruptcy after paying out the $4m they’ve paid out to their principals and lawyers. The real truth is that nobody is being held accountable for these patent trolls litigation and that no individual is being held accountable for their actions. We need patent reform for a lot of reasons in America and this is clearly one of them. Hopefully this will ruin Macrosolve’s patent claims in future litigation so that others can simply point to Newegg’s dismissal and not waste legal resources and money on court.

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It’s not exactly that One sleeps over at my house (that’s reserved for one blondie

The clock isn’t stopping there. In 10 hours time, Jim Jannard and RED team will announce more details about EPIC and Scarlet, 5K and 3K cameras that will set the world on fire in 2009. My assumption would be that RED will announce the availability dates and the performance of these cameras, but there might be something even bigger, as Jannard stated on Reduser.net forums. You can expect a massive price drop for both cameras, and vastly improved capabilities when compared to the parts Jannard announced earlier this year, at NAB in Las Vegas. It looks like RED has found the secret sauce to vastly increase the capabilities of their own sensor, while decreasing the price. If you’re wondering what LG Scarlet and RED Scarlet have in common, the answer is quite simple: the color red and lawsuit that RED filed against LG (for stealing Red’s trademark name). But on a bright side of things, I can’t wait for this 10 hours to pass.

So, head over to RED.com and wait…

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