RealNC:

Fair use is about using copyrighted work that you do not own in your own work. Benchmark results are not copyrighted work. So it's not even about fair use. It's just BS some companies put in their EULAs. VMware is doing the same. If you use a VMware product, you are not allowed to run benchmarks and publish the results. In other words, the EULA prohibits reviews of the product. Imagine if this was actually enforceable. Like NVidia or AMD putting such a clause in their EULA. You are not allowed to review/bench their GPUs. Unfortunately, the legal teams of companies who do put this kind of BS in their EULA are in a position to push the "little guy" (small sites) around with legal threats. Even if you are 101% in the right, you can't afford to go against them and need to comply because they have infinite money compared to you.

Just like Warranty voided if removed BS that turned out to be illegal. Never new about VMware doing that kind of thing. Yeah a sad but true statement that the little guy cannot challenge the big guy because of $$$.

RealNC:

Patent trolling refers to random companies, owned by random nobodies, that never invented anything, going out and buying patents so that they can then extort money out of others. Many of these patents don't even hold up if they went to court (most fall under prior art.) But in some cases, the targets just want to avoid lawsuits, so they pay up. This is not the case with Intel. They did invent the x86 architecture. It's not a BS patent that wouldn't hold up. It's legit. If you want to compete with Intel, invent your own instruction sets. Like AMD, ARM, IBM, and others do.

I now this definition, but they are just doing other sort of patent exploitation what is sort of trolling too in my book. They can sell something and still control resales of already sold property its against open market, which is making capitalism working.