02.20.22
Gemini version available ♊︎The Patent Distortion: Weekly Series About Failure of the Media to Properly Explain Patents and Generally Cover the News
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News is Noise in 2022 – Part I
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Video download link | md5sum b81f8359a9b7b23ce0c75b0e40423209
News is Noise in 2022 – Part II
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: Today we resume last week’s ‘experimental’ series in which we review patent 'news' along with related news, for the most part condemning the online sources (heavily gamed by special interests) for misinformation, disinformation, defamation (e.g. of judges) and basically lobbying activities/marketing campaigns wrapped up as “journalism” or “reporting”; it wasn’t always so bad and in 2022 it has come to the point where over 90% of “coverage” is misleading, one-sided, sometimes even fabricated
SO last week we tried, probably for the first time*, a 3-hour video exploring the past week’s “news” about patents, explaining that it had gone so rogue that it’s hard to find actual journalism; instead, one receives lots of lies, lobbying, and deliberate distortion of facts by law firms. We’ve since decided to make this a weekly feature, seeing that many people accessed last week’s video.
That’s not to say that 0% of the “news” about patents is worthless or misleading (sometimes to mislead politicians). The other day, for instance, we saw this new report about Dr. Duda, whom we wrote about many times before, even a few years ago. Duda complains about well-connected technology giants looking to ‘steal’ and then patent his work; the latest ‘heist’ is blamed on Microsoft:
Microsoft last month received a US patent covering modifications to a data-encoding technique called rANS, one of several variants in the Asymmetric Numeral System (ANS) family that support data compression schemes used by leading technology companies and open source projects.
The creator of ANS, Jarosław Duda, assistant professor at Institute of Computer Science at Jagiellonian University in Poland, has been trying for years to keep ANS patent-free and available for public use. Back in 2018, Duda’s lobbying helped convince Google to abandon its ANS-related patent claim in the US and Europe. And he raised the alarm last year when he learned Microsoft had applied for an rANS (range asymmetric number system) patent.
Now that Microsoft’s patent application has been granted, he fears the utility of ANS will be diminished, as software developers try to steer clear of a potential infringement claim.
“I don’t know what to do with it – [Microsoft's patent] looks like just the description of the standard algorithm,” he told The Register in an email. The algorithm is used in JPEG XL and CRAM, as well as open source projects run by Facebook (Meta), Nvidia, and others.
We’re quite certain patent examiners are aware of such problems; under pressure from management, given that Microsoft is a "big client", patents would often be erroneously granted, not only on maths/algorithms but also to the wrong person/s.
“It’s about promotion of crime and cover-up of severe abuses, it’s not about informing EPO stakeholders.”In the video above, the first of several (we’ve sometimes split weekly series into several parts or few logical chunks), I’ve decided to trawl though some RSS feeds and focus on the degree of deception; putting aside Google ‘News’ (Gulag Noise), which is stacked or gamed or Googlebombed by litigation profiteers, there are so-called ‘news’ sites like Juve and Watchtroll, which are in the pocket of those same litigation profiteers. Even Patenty-O, which is run by a lecturer**, recently bragged (even repeatedly) that it was being sponsored by litigation profiteers that lobby for software patents. How is one expected to retrieve objective news about patents when litigation profiteers control just about every outlet? As for the EPO, its Web site became a constant propaganda mill that defies the EPC and instead glorifies Benoît Battistelli, António Campinos, illegal actions, and even European software patents. It’s about promotion of crime and cover-up of severe abuses, it’s not about informing EPO stakeholders***.
“At some stage we might make a one-page index for this current series.”As I noted last week, both in text and in video, the reason it’s likely better to respond in video is that it is faster, more expressive, and takes full advantage of increasing network capacities; at the moment we have no restrictions on space and traffic (SAN migration completed earlier this month), which we’ve hopefully secured for years to come. In case there’s downtime in the main site, use the Gemini capsule or its Web proxy. They’re part of our anti-censorship mechanisms and they can also outlive the World Wide Web, which probably won’t be around at all several decades from now. The videos are, by default, encoded as WebM, but we can always format-shift these if that becomes necessary in the future. A full archive of our videos can be found here (we have 877 WebM files, 647 Ogg files, and 58 MP4 files). At some stage we might make a one-page index for this current series. █
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* We used to do weekly features about Novell and OpenSUSE about 15 years ago. These features targeted strategic areas at particular times (back then we explained that SUSE itself quite likely needed to be separated from Microsoft/Novell).
** Post-Jeremy IP Kat (it used to be controlled by a lecturer) was never the same after sanctions from the EPO. Now it’s controlled by people who work for aggressive litigation firms and patent profiteers (e.g. AstraZeneca).
*** Today’s EPO management fails to understand that actual scientists should be the main/sole stakeholders. Instead, the politicians who run the EPO are led to think “licensing societies” matter the most and they’re not even stakeholders but “users” or “clients” or “customers” (as if the EPO is a shop).
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