On this episode of This Week in Linux, a brief note about Linus Tech Tips reaction videos, Blender 3.0, EndeavourOS, CentOS Stream 9, NixOS 21.11, Open 3D Engine, Heroic Games Launcher, Steam Deck, Fedora, Fedora Linux, Red Hat, RHEL, Ventoy 1.0.62, CrossOver 21.1, SDL 2.0.18, Xen Project 4.16, Tesseract 5.0, and Neovim 0.6.0. All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
XWayland is increasingly great shape especially when it comes to fulfilling the needs of gamers with simply running games lacking native Wayland support with great speed. But when it comes to other use-cases there are occasionally gaps and areas not yet fulfilled by XWayland versus the conventional X.Org Server. One of the latest examples of a feature now correctly wired up is touchpad gesture handling.
Should you be a fan of touchpad gestures, they should now be working under XWayland.
Developer Povilas Kanapickas implemented support for touchpad gestures within the XWayland code that is now in the xserver Git tree. Povilas noted, "The implementation is relatively straightforward because both wayland and Xorg use libinput semantics for touchpad gestures."
Terminal often intimidates new users. However, once you get to know it, you gradually start liking it. Well, that happens with most Linux users.
Even if you are using Ubuntu as a desktop system, you may have to enter the terminal at times. New users are often clueless about many things. Some knowledge of basic Linux commands always helps in such cases but this article is not about that.
This article focuses on explaining small, basic and often ignored things about using the terminal. This should help new Ubuntu desktop users to know the terminal and use it with slightly more efficiency. 
Autodesk, Inc. is an American multinational software company that makes software products and services for the architecture, engineering, construction, product design, manufacturing, media, education, and entertainment industries. It bills itself as a “… leader in 3D design, engineering and entertainment software”.
The company was founded in 1982 by John Walker, who was a joint developer of the first versions of AutoCAD, the company’s best known software application. Autodesk is listed on the Nasdaq stock exchange, it has over 11,000 employees, and is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
While Autodesk develops many high quality applications they are proprietary software. And the vast majority of their products are not available for Linux. This series looks at the best free and open source alternatives.
Want to give your Terminal a retro look? This guide contains instructions to help you to install Cool Retro Terminal application in all Linux distributions.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Hadoop on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Hadoop is an open-source, Java-based software platform that manages data processing and storage for big data applications. It is designed to scale up from single servers to thousands of machines, each offering local computation and storage.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Apache Hadoop on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
This is our recommended stuffs for you after finished Parabola GNU/Linux installation with either GNOME or KDE Desktop. Let's start it!
Looking for a free and open-source web hosting control panel? Then try out CyberPanel on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8. It is a free alternative to the popular WHM Cpanel that comes with an OpenLiteSpeed Web server to provide the best possible performance.
CyberPanel has a web-based, graphical, and user interactive Dashboard, from where we can access Users, Vhost Templates; multiple PHP Versions; MySQL Database, and more.
It also offers a CLI tool that commands can be used on the Server terminal to perform various useful operations such as creating users, resetting permissions, and other tasks.
In this guide we are going to set up an sftp server on an Debian 11. We will also set up a form of chroot where users can only access sftp with the shared credentials.
The File Transfer Protocol is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network.
FTP isn’t popular today because it Lacks Security. When a file is sent using this protocol, the data, username, and password are all shared in plain text, which means a hacker can access this information with little to no effort. For data to be secure, you need to use an upgraded version of FTP like SFTP.
In this guide, we will learn how to do basic operations on an sftp server.
The File Transfer Protocol is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network.
FTP isn’t popular today because it Lacks Security. When a file is sent using this protocol, the data, username, and password are all shared in plain text, which means a hacker can access this information with little to no effort. For data to be secure, you need to use an upgraded version of FTP like SFTP.
Raspberry PI Pico works greatly to keep sensors measurements, combining/analyzing them and delivering data to external world. Adding an Etherneth port to Raspberry PI Pico with the WIZnet Ethernet HAT (based on W5100S chip) add a networking layer to improve communications
The surge can also be due to the Steam Deck effect.
We review the EndeavourOS 21.4 (Atlantis) — the best Arch Linux flavor for beginners.
launched and that effectively serving as the bleeding-edge of the RHEL9 upstream, EPEL 9 has already launched.
Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux "EPEL" continues to provide a vast assortment of packages to complement the official packages in the RHEL/CentOS repository. EPEL packages continue to be derived from their Fedora counterpart and simply augment what is available to RHEL / CentOS (and Oracle Linux, et al) users.
There's something special about maps. I remember opening the front book cover of JRR Tolkien's The Hobbit when I was younger, staring at the hand-drawn map of Middle Earth, and feeling the wealth of possibility contained in the simple drawing. Aside from their obvious purpose of actually describing where things are in relation to other things, I think maps do a great job of expressing potential. You could step outside and take the road this way or that way, and if you do, just think of all the new and exciting things you'll be able to see.
A year after Arm processors began mitigating straight-line speculation, Linux developers have been working on similar straight-line speculation mitigations for x86/x86_64 processors.
The past few months we have been seeing Linux kernel and GCC and LLVM/Clang patches around straight-line speculation mitigation for Intel / AMD processors. The issue at hand is over processors speculatively executing instructions linearly in memory past an unconditional change in control flow.
Mali has been struggling to contain an Islamist insurgency that first erupted in the north in 2012 and has since claimed thousands of military and civilian lives.
Winds rarely break into the news except when they disrupt daily life. But many sports—including all boating, most hunting, archery, surfing, casting—keep us mindful of wind. Here in San Francisco, two of the most thrilling sports depend on ocean wind. From the cliffs of Fort Funston, hang gliders use the coming wind to rise as they launch over the Pacific. Homeward bound after fishing the Pacific, our party boat is usually intercepted near the Golden Gate Bridge by a kiteboard, whose rider has one arm steering his kite, flying high above and buffeted there by that potent incoming wind, while the other arm works a line steering his board. He rides our turbulent wake, zigzagging madly because his wind-driven speed is faster than our boat's.
Last month's COP26 climate summit at Glasgow ended as a complete flop. While some have hailed as success the mere inclusion of the phrase "unabated coal should be phased down" in the final agreement, the fact of the matter is that the transition from fossil fuels to clean energy remains a distant dream. It should also be obvious to all that the climate deal reached at COP26 in no way prevents planetary temperature from crossing the 1.5 degrees Celsius threshold.
We had just discussed some actions Major League Baseball has taken on its MLB.com website which is either fallout from the labor lockout currently going on or MLB playing leverage games with players, depending on your perspective. Essentially, MLB scrubbed most of its website, particularly on the home and "news" pages, of references to any current players. Instead, those pages are full of stories about retired players, candidates for the Hall of Fame, and that sort of thing. In the tabs for the current rosters, the site still has all of the names of players listed, but has replaced each and every player headshot with a stock image of a silhouette. MLB says it was doing this to ensure that no player "likenesses or images" are considered in use for commerce or advertising... but that doesn't make much sense. The names are still there and this specific section is a factual representation of current team rosters.
Sen. Bernie Sanders on Saturday called it unacceptable to sit back and watch the U.S. Supreme Court possibly end the right of women to access abortion care and said his colleagues in the Senate should act urgently to end the filibuster and codify into federal law the protections afforded by Roe v. Wade—the historic ruling now under the most severe threat since it was first decided in 1973.
"When it comes to telling every woman in America what she can or cannot do with her own body, about whether or not she can access reproductive health care, now all of a sudden my Republican colleagues are exponents of very big and oppressive government... What hypocrisy!"
Does the process of constitution-making matter more than the particularities of constitutional design? Recently published research by a growing range of social scientists and legal scholars indicates yes. For instance, in their book Constituents Before Assembly, Todd Eisenstadt, A. Carl LeVan, and Tofigh Maboudi provide their findings from a sweeping empirical analysis of the effects of popular participation in constitutionalization. The takeaway? As noted in my Law & Society Review review, "participatory constitution-making…has a lasting and systematic effect on subsequent democratization."
Human rights champions decried a Friday announcement by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that it was extending what critical experts call the wholly misguided Title 42 border program that allows officials to exploit public health fears as a way to block lawful and protected efforts by asylum-seekers to seek refuge in the United States.
"Instead of guaranteeing protection and care to asylum seekers, as the U.S. is legally obligated to do, the Biden administration is actively choosing to use cruelty to supposedly 'deter' those who had no choice in fleeing for their lives."
Theoretically, the district court's injunction is scheduled to enter into force on December 9 (next week's Thursday), but I strongly doubt that it's going to happen then.
I still hope Epic will succeed with its appeal of the district court's flat rejection of Epic's federal antitrust claims against Apple, though the odds are against Epic now, primarily because of the high hurdles for private antitrust litigation in the United States (prior to the kind of reform that Capitol Hill lawmakers are working on) and secondarily because Epic missed out on certain opportunities (such as to convince the trial court that so-called Progressive Web Apps are not a viable alternative to native apps for a mix oftechnical, commercial, and legal considerations). But my personal hopes for loosening Apple's ironclad grip on the iOS app market are one thing, and the fundamental flaws of the California Unfair Competition law (UCL) injunction the district court awarded Epic as a consolation prize are another. Also, the end of opening up the iOS app market doesn't justify the means of trolling Apple with foreseeably aggressive contempt motions should the injunction get enforced (which in turn would place an unnecessary burden on the federal judiciary).
In procedural terms, the first question for the West Coast appeals court to decide on Apple's request for an administrative stay or whether to proceed directly to the adjudication of the motion, which would also be possible pretty quickly as Apple handily satisfies the criteria for a stay. I call an administrative stay a "micro-stay": it's a stay for the purpose of preserving the status quo while the court is weighing, for a few more days or weeks, the motion and deciding on whether to grant a stay for the entire duration of the appellate proceedings.
Nursing unions from 28 countries and territories representing over 2.5 million health workers have filed a complaint to the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, accusing a number of high-income countries that have opposed a temporary TRIPS waiver at the World Trade Organization of a rights violation.
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The appeal was made for WTO’s ministerial meetings this week, which was postponed after the detection of a new COVID-19 variant named Omicron last week that led to travel bans.
James Schneider, communications director of Progressive International, however, said that the postponement of the WTO meeting and the detection of a new COVID-19 variant only strengthens the case made by nurses.
“The longer the whole world isn’t vaccinated, the more chance the virus has to mutate, costing untold numbers of lives to inflate the already engorged super profits of a few pharma companies,” he said.
WHO estimates between 80,000 and 180,000 health workers could have died from COVID-19 from January 2020 to May 2021.
Formerly registered in the National Register of Varieties of Fruit Plants and Rootstocks under the name of Clementine Sanzo, it is now in the process of filing for a European patent at the CPVO (Community Plant Variety Office), under the name of Clementine Perrina, after the breeder's surname. (Application for Community Plant Variety Rights N€° 2020/1687).
In this altered climatic environment, the variety of Common clementine, which is still the most widespread in Italy, is showing increasing quality problems, with a progressive reduction of the calendar and therefore a commercial period significantly reduced over the past decade (the same is happening in Spain with the variety Clemenules).
Hymmen Germany, a global digital printing systems provider, announced Nov. 25 that it had won a digital printing patent infringement litigation against Barberán S.A.
The Court of Düsseldorf, Germany, found Hymmen’s digital printing patent (EP2313281) to be infringed by Barberán. Prior to this decision, the European Patent Office had also confirmed the validity of the patent during opposition proceedings, the company says.
Bielefeld, Germany, November 29, 2021-Hymmen, a global digital printing systems provider, has won a digital printing patent infringement litigation against Barberán S.A..
The Court of Düsseldorf, Germany, found Hymmen’s digital printing patent EP2313281 (DE) to be infringed by Barberán. Prior to this decision, the European Patent Office had also confirmed the validity of the patent during opposition proceedings.
Business group IBEC has called on the Government to publish a timetable for ratifying an agreement setting up a Unified Patent Court (UPC).
The organisation said that Austria’s recent ratification of the deal had cleared the way for the court to start work in 2022 – with or without Ireland.
Aidan Sweeney (IBEC’s senior public-sector and regulatory executive) said that “prompt action” was now needed.
Auto licensing litigation hits Detroit as Ford faces infringement claims from an NPE member of the Avanci pool
Quality of judges and their case management skills undoubtedly hold the key to UPC’s success, and so their appointments will be closely watched by interested businesses. JUVE has reported that the Preparatory Committee has confirmed that there will appoint around 95 legal and technical judges. This can happen when one more participating state ratifies and deposits the PAP Protocol (protocol on the provisional application) – which looks likely very soon.
After four years of experience with Spanish Act 24/2015, of 24 July, on Patents (the “new Patent Act”), which came into force on 1 April 2017, the time seems ripe now to update some aspects of the Act that could be further improved. In this vein, earlier this year the Spanish Patent and Trademark Office (“SPTO”) published a draft text of amendments that, among other improvements, admits the protection of pharmaceutical substances and compositions via utility models.
The text of Article 137.2 of the new Patent Act, currently in force, explicitly excludes pharmaceutical substances and compositions from protection via utility models.
Although a silent technological revolution is currently taking place in the tobacco industry, there is no publicly available data on patents that read on tobacco harm-reduction technologies. We recently conducted a patent analysis and found that, in the developing world, there are only few patents filed relating to tobacco harm reduction. This stands in stark contrast to the rigorous intellectual property (IP) enforcement strategy pursued in developed nations. Technologies that reduce the adverse effects of smoking may be an important asset to public health and it may be reasonable—and just—to make these technologies available to consumers in developing and developed countries alike. There should be further discussion to explore how this could be achieved.
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The key patent owners for the new harm-reduction technologies are large tobacco companies, including British American Tobacco Plc, Philip Morris International Inc, Imperial Brands Plc, and China National Tobacco Corporation. Quite a few of these patents are held through their subsidiaries, such as Nicoventures (British American Tobacco) and Nerudia (Imperial Brands).
Tobacco harm-reduction patents fall into three broad categories: nicotine vaping technologies, heated tobacco technologies, and smokeless tobacco technologies. A total of about 74,000 patents were filed in the last ten years for these technologies.
Palisade Bio, Inc. (NASDAQ: PALI), a late-stage biopharmaceutical company advancing therapies for acute and chronic gastrointestinal (GI) complications, today announced that the company will be granted a patent from the European Patent Office (EPO) covering its lead investigational drug product, LB1148. The patent will publish on December 22, 2021, and provide protection until 2035.
“With the European patent grant, this greatly strengthens the IP protection of our lead drug candidate LB1148 for the global pharmaceutical market. This grant builds upon the corresponding patents in the United States, China, Australia, Japan, India, Mexico, and Taiwan,” said Thomas Hallam, Ph.D., CEO of Palisade Bio. “We are continuing to strengthen patent protections for LB1148 and its uses across the globe as we advance our clinical studies with LB1148.”
Finnegan attorneys Paul Browning, Christopher Johns, Sara Leiman, and Yelena Morozova explain some of the differences between patent-eligibility standards in the U.S. and those in other parts of the world.
Ever year patentees file more patent applications in a wider range of countries. Since the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) came into force in 1978, nearly four million PCT applications have been filed to enable patentees to obtain international protection for their inventions — and more than half of these PCT applications were filed in the last ten years.1A broad patent portfolio is of increasing importance to large and small companies in a variety of fields.
Yet, prosecuting patents in different countries can be challenging. Each country has its own laws for pursuing patent applications and achieving enforceable patents. And while treaties and other agreements (like the Paris Convention and the PCT) lay a foundation for many countries' patent systems, local patent law varies widely on the issue of patent eligibility.
Cantargia AB reported today that oppositions have been filed against one of Cantargia's European patents, EP3293202. This patent provides a broad protection for IL1RAP-targeting antibodies with similar properties as nadunolimab. Cantargia holds a large number of granted patents related to IL1RAP-targeting therapies. The oppositions have no formal impact on Cantargia's other patents, including those specifically covering nadunolimab.
Cantargia has extensive patent protection for IL1RAP-targeting antibodies, through over 100 granted patents globally including therapy and diagnostics of cancer. Cantargia's patent families also include patents, granted in key commercial territories such as the US, Europe, Japan and China, related to treatment of leukemias and solid tumors.
The sudden surge in ex parte re-examinations at the USPTO over the last year is a sure sign that there is value to be had for those who stay well informed. As the PTAB has issued more discretionary denials of inter partes reviews, increasing numbers of patent challengers have turned to these pre-America Invents Act tools, and for good reason. As Jeffrey Townes and Hongling Zou point out, these procedures offer significant advantages, particularly with regard to speed, cost and the prospect of anonymity.
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Finally, turning to the EPO, Tony Afram and Gianluca Tarasconi from ipQuants present a compelling data-driven argument that some of the world’s biggest and most well-resourced patent owners are missing out on vital strategic opportunities in the crucial European market. Their deep dive into opposition activity at the EPO provides plenty of food for thought for the many in-house executives making the continent a bigger part of their global patent strategies.
A decision from the Federal Patent Court could be the most pragmatic solution to emerge from the debate so far, sources say
Pare the list to those that are both sensible and in force legally, meaning a fee is paid to a patent office to keep them alive, and there are 16m patents that count. Last year, 1.6m were granted.
Most are the property of companies, but balance-sheets and conventional accounting are ill-suited to capturing their worth. Using acquisition cost, then depreciating it, does not work. Instead, lawyers provide subjective numbers based on factors such as a patent’s likely validity, royalties and litigation history. Many firms reckon it is not worth paying the tens of thousands of dollars that it costs for a valuation.
In Mobility Workx, LLC v. Unified Patents, LLC, (Fed. Cir. 2021), the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals addressed challenges to the constitutionality of the structure of the Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Mobility owned a patent for a wireless communication system. Mobility sued T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless for patent infringement in the Eastern District of Texas in 2017. A group of patent challengers, Unified Patents, filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) in 2018, seeking to invalidate the patent’s claims on obviousness grounds. In 2019, the PTAB issued a decision that certain claims were invalid as obvious. Mobility appealed to the Federal Circuit.
On appeal, Mobility argued that the PTAB’s structure is unconstitutional as violative of due process because the PTAB is biased against patent owners. Mobility contended that: (1) the PTAB members have a vested interest in instituting IPRs and other AIA proceedings to raise money for the Board and to ensure their jobs security; and (2) the individual PTAB judges have a financial interest in instituting IPRs and other AIA proceedings to obtain bonuses in their compensation.
In Arsus, LLC v. Unified Patents, LLC, (Fed. Cir. Nov. 16, 2021), the Federal Circuit affirmed, through a Rule 36 judgment, the PTAB’s ruling granting a Request for Adverse Judgment After Institution of Trial.
Arsus initially sued Tesla Motors, Inc. for patent infringement in the Northern District of California asserting U.S. Patent No. 10,259,494. The ’494 patent is directed to a “rollover prevention apparatus.” The patent describes an “adaptive steering range limiting device,” which “prevents the steering wheel of the vehicle from being turned beyond the threshold of vehicle rollover, but otherwise does not restrict the rotational range of motion of the steering wheel of the vehicle.”
Unified Patents filed for inter partes review, challenging Arsus’ claims as being unpatentable under 35 U.S.C. €§ 103. Arsus then filed for statutory disclaimer of all challenged claims with the USPTO under 37 C.F.R. 1.321(a), and subsequently filed a Motion to Dismiss with the Board. In doing so, Arsus argued that because all of the claims at issue were disclaimed, there was no longer any case or controversy, and thus the Board had no jurisdiction to do anything other than to dismiss the IPR. However, the Board construed Arsus’s disclaimer as a Request for Adverse Judgment under 37 C.F.R. €§ 42.73(b), and terminated the IPR in favor of Unified Patents.
The amendments implemented by the Patent Office are definitely a step in the right direction, as they go a long way to reducing the burden on patentees managing large patent portfolios and dealing with a large number of licensees and sub-licensees. The changes are consistent with India’s current policy of improving the ease of doing business and should lead to an increase in compliance with statement of working requirements in India.
Having said that, some concerns remain. For instance, confidentiality concerns regarding the information being published by the Patent Office continue unabated. There have been instances where patentees have been forced to re-negotiate their licence agreements with some licensees, as the revenue generated by the other co-licensees fell in the public domain.
Patentees engaging with a large number of licensees or sub-licensees might find it cumbersome to ensure compliance with the requirement, as besides the patentee, every licensee and sub-licensee must now individually submit a statement of working before the Patent Office.
Above all, the larger question worth pondering is whether such a provision is even required today, considering India has come a long way from the “under-developed nation” it was described as in the Ayanggar Committee Report 1959. India is now the world’s fifth largest economy, often referred to as the ‘pharmacy of the world’.
Moreover, it is clear from the Ayanggar Committee Report that such a provision may have been important at the time due to lack of alternative resources for obtaining relevant information, but today, when it has become more difficult to hide information rather than obtain it, a number of resources are available to determine whether a patent is being worked in India and whether the requirement of the public at large is being met.
Meanwhile, patentees are well advised to ensure compliance with the requirements of the law as it stands. It is worthwhile revisiting strategies for complying with this requirement as the information being provided by them is not only being used to determine the extent of the working of an invention but for other aspects as well. So, until there is further change, all steps should be taken to comply with the working requirement.
Multinational law firm Pinsent Masons has recruited partner András Kupecz to its European life sciences team, further bolstering its Netherlands-based technology, science and industry capabilities.
András Kupecz, who has joined the patent team of Pinsent Masons as its second patent partner, is qualified as a lawyer, and a Dutch and European patent attorney. This makes him one of the few lawyers in the Dutch market who is both dual-qualified and specialised in patent litigation.
Düsseldorf Regional Court has ruled that C.G. Haenel’s CR 223 assault rifle infringes a patent held by competitor Heckler & Koch. Specifically, the rifle manufacturer enforced European patent EP 20 18 508 B1, which protects a type of rifle-locking system. The dispute concerns the openings for rapid water drainage from the gun.
Following the referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeal, which we reacted to here, the EPO has now announced that it will stay, with immediate effect, “all examination and opposition proceedings before the EPO in which the decision depends entirely on the outcome of the referral”. The stay will be lifted as soon as possible after the Enlarged Board of Appeal has issued its decision.
If the EPO decides that proceedings are to be stayed, the EPO will inform the parties, withdraw any communications setting time limits requiring a reaction, and set no further time limits until the stay is lifted.
According to the EPO’s notice, this decision will affect patent applications and patents in which the assessment of inventive step is exclusively based on evidence, such as experimental data, which was not publicly available before the filing date of the application and which was filed after that date.
What this means for applicants, patent owners and opponents is, so far, unclear. Consideration of plausibility and post-published data is relatively common at the EPO, particularly in cases in the chemical and life sciences. It is not yet clear in how many of these cases the assessment of inventive step can be said to rest exclusively on post-published evidence. How broadly the EPO applies this stay will become apparent in the coming weeks and months as they start to notify the affected parties.
Where priority is claimed from an earlier application, the EPO requires a certified copy of the earlier application (priority document). Currently, where the priority document is an earlier Chinese, Korean, or United States patent application, the EPO includes a certified copy of the priority document in the file automatically and free of charge.
Following a recent decision of the EPO, from 1 January 2022, the EPO will no longer automatically include certified copies of earlier Chinese, Korean, or US patent applications in the file free of charge. Instead, applicants claiming priority from earlier Chinese, Korean, or US patent applications will be required to take positive action to support their priority claim. Applicants may use the WIPO’s DAS system by supplying the DAS access code, or file a certified copy of the priority document issued by the Chinese, Korean, or United States patent office.
On November 29, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,271,980, owned by III Holdings 12, LLC, an NPE and Intellectual Ventures entity. The '980 patent is generally directed to managing jobs in a multi-node computing environment. The ‘980 patent is purportedly related to open source container orchestration systems for automating computer applications, such as Kubernetes.
On November 26, 2021, the USPTO issued a notice of intent to issue a reexamination certificate, cancelling all claims of U.S. Patent 7,302,612, owned by BCS Software LLC. The '612 patent relates to a high-level operational support framework for monitoring, assessing, and managing the health of applications (or components/objects) in a distributed computing environment. The ‘612 patent has been asserted against Hewlett Packard, Elster Solutions (Honeywell), Landis+Gyr, and Itron. The final office action was issued approximately 7 months from when the reexamination was ordered.
On November 29, 2021, Unified Patents added a new PATROLL contest, with a $2,000 cash prize, seeking prior art on U.S. Design Patent D930702. The design patent is owned by Wepay Global Payment, LLC, an NPE and William Grecia entity. The patent describes the ornamental design for a display screen portion with animated graphical user interface. It is currently being asserted against Samsung, PayPal, and PNC Bank.
On November 30, 2021, less than one month after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 10,244,252, owned by the Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI), as part of Unified's ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone. The ‘252 patent is part of the HEVC Advance Patent Pool, as well as SISVEL's AV1 patent pool.
The EUIPO’s Boards of Appeal commits to establishing a mediation centre and offering alternative dispute resolution to all parties
On 31 January 2017, Joaquim Jósé Esteves Lopes Granja (“Granja”) applied to register PORTWO GIN as an EU trade mark for “Spirits [beverages]”. The application was published for opposition on 6 February 2017. On 19 April 2017, Instituto dos Vinhos do Douro e do Porto (“Instituto”) filed an opposition against Granja’s application, submitting that it infringed the PDOs ‘Porto’ and ‘Port’ in the territory of Portugal.
At first instance, the EUIPO’s Opposition Division rejected the opposition in its entirety. It held that the opposition was not well founded under Article 8(6) of Regulation No. 2017/1001 (which the GC later said must be understood to refer to Article 8(4a) of Regulation No. 207/2009 due to the date of filing of the application).
Instituto filed an appeal, which was upheld by the BoA. The BoA held that:
(1) the PDO ‘Porto’ enjoyed a reputation within the meaning of Article 103(2)(a)(ii) of Regulation No. 1308/2013; (2) ‘use’ required that the mark applied for made use of the PDO, either in the form as registered or in a form so close that it was indissociable; (3) PORTWO GIN and ‘Porto’ were very similar; (4) the relevant consumer would likely associate the mark applied for with ‘Porto’; (5) use of PORTWO GIN was likely to affect consumers’ preferences by inducing them to believe that Granja’s spirits complied with the strict requirements and quality standards of the PDO; and (6) PORTWO GIN made direct use of ‘Porto’ and its use for the goods at issue was likely to exploit its reputation.
Accordingly, the BoA annulled the decision of the Opposition Division and rejected the application for PORTWO GIN in its entirety. Granja then appealed to the GC.
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The essence of this case distils down to the meaning of “use” and provides further clarity on the operation of PDOs in an opposition context.
It is interesting that the GC held that the image and qualities of ‘Porto’ could transfer to gin. This emphasises that, as the GC detailed in its decision, the courts are generally willing to give PDOs a wide scope of protection, to protect the interests “not only of consumers but also of producers who have made concerted efforts to guarantee the qualities expected of goods displaying such PDO or PGI legitimately” (paragraph 37).
Picture on the upper right is by Ceri Knott, who has granted right of reproduction.
Attorney Aaron Wood, who successfully secured the revocation of several Banksy-owned trademarks, will start work on December 1
This is a trademark case. Dollar Financial holds registered trademarks for MONEY MART – the name it uses for its payday and title loan venders as well as pawn shops and pawn brokerages. The company had been using the name for several years in the payday loan business, and in 2012 expanded into pawn shops and then filed for registration for that usage in 2013. The USPTO then granted the registrations associated with the new uses.
As previously discussed, the Copyright (Rights and Remuneration of Musicians, Etc.) Bill proposed new laws for equitable remuneration for streaming, contract adjustment, right of revocation and transparency. The Bill was debated in the UK Parliament on Friday 3rd December. Here's what happened [aside from a whole load of completely unnecessary and tedious oversharing from several MPs about their life stories, or having once looked at a musical instrument *eye roll*].
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Seema Malhotra MP reiterated that the Bill was about addressing imbalances in power since, as she said, most streaming income ends up in the pockets of major corporations and digital giants. She argued that the current system is unfair and therefore copyright needs to be updated to address this, stating that "it is the duty of this house to challenge and keep copyright up to date... to modernise the law so it reflects the reality of the music industry." She concluded that the "reforms to copyright law will create a fairer system for musicians and for new talent to be paid fairly. Legislation is needed urgently."
While there was largely a consensus on the existence of the issues highlighted by the Inquiry, in the debate, disagreement arose as to whether the provisions of the Bill were able to provide solutions to those issues. John Whittingdale MP, whose son works for a major record label, largely echoed the rhetoric of the BPI and AIM, who had released statements of concern around the impact of the Bill on the business models of the record labels that they represent. The words 'unintended consequences' were uttered several times in relation to the labels having to share streaming revenue, or indeed information and rights, with the performers and artists. This seems rather peculiar, since the goal of the Bill was, in fact, exactly that; to rebalance the inequity in power and more fairly distribute the wealth from streaming.
PropellerAds has hit back at the MPA after the Hollywood-backed group nominated the business as a "notorious market" that facilitates piracy. The advertising company characterizes the report as factually wrong and libelous. The company further reminds the US Government that Hollywood also framed the VCR as an illegal technology years ago.
