Ubuntu 20.04 Released https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2020/04/download-ubuntu-20-04 Ubuntu Survey Results https://ubuntu.com/blog/ubuntu-20-04-survey-results Fedora 32 Released https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-32/ Lenovo Now Shipping Fedora on Thinkpads https://fedoramagazine.org/coming-soon-fedora-on-lenovo-laptops/ Manjaro 20 Released https://forum.manjaro.org/t/manjaro-20-0-lysia-released/138633 Bug In Git May Leak Credentials https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Git-Newline-Leak-Vulnerability Linux Kernel 5.7 rc4 Out https://lkml.org/lkml/2020/5/3/306 Linux Kernel 5.5 Is Now End of Life http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/2004.2/07196.html
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.2 Out https://www.redhat.com/archives/rhelv6-list/2020-April/msg00000.html
Parrot 4.9 Out https://parrotsec.org/blog/parrot-4.9-release-notes/
IPFire 2.25 Core Update 143 Out https://blog.ipfire.org/post/ipfire-2-25-core-update-143-released
Oracle Virtualbox 6.1.6 Out https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Changelog-6.1
LibreOffice 6.4.3 Out https://blog.documentfoundation.org/blog/2020/04/16/libreoffice-6-4-3/
Proton 5.0-6 Out https://www.gamingonlinux.com/articles/steam-play-proton-50-6-is-out-to-help-doom-eternal-rockstar-launcher-and-more-on-linux.16442
VLC 3.0.10 Out https://www.videolan.org/vlc/releases/3.0.10.html
Darktable 3.0.2 Out https://www.darktable.org/2020/04/darktable-302-released/
OpenSUSE Tumbleweed for AWS Marketplace Out https://9to5linux.com/opensuse-tumbleweed-is-now-available-on-aws-marketplace
KDE 20.04 Applications Out https://9to5linux.com/kde-applications-20-04-officially-released-this-is-whats-new
Credits: Ubuntu “Complete” sound: Canonical Theme Music: From The Dust – Stardust
Linux creator Linus Torvalds had some choice words today on Advanced Vector Extensions 512 (AVX-512) found on select Intel processors.
In a mailing list discussion stemming from the Phoronix article this week on the compiler instructions Intel is enabling for Alder Lake (and Sapphire Rapids), Linus Torvalds chimed in. The Alder Lake instructions being flipped on in GCC right now make no mention of AVX-512 but only AVX2 and others, likely due to Intel pursuing the subset supported by both the small and large cores in this new hybrid design being pursued.
I hope AVX512 dies a painful death, and that Intel starts fixing real problems instead of trying to create magic instructions to then create benchmarks that they can look good on.
I hope Intel gets back to basics: gets their process working again, and concentrate more on regular code that isn't HPC or some other pointless special case.
I've said this before, and I'll say it again: in the heyday of x86, when Intel was laughing all the way to the bank and killing all their competition, absolutely everybody else did better than Intel on FP loads. Intel's FP performance sucked (relatively speaking), and it matter not one iota.
Because absolutely nobody cares outside of benchmarks.
The same is largely true of AVX512 now - and in the future...
While Lenovo recently committed to certifying more systems for Linux use and upstreaming drivers / hardware support for Linux moving forward, there remains a backlog of existing Lenovo devices that still have less than desire Linux support. But thanks to Red Hat and others, the hardware support does continue advancing.
The Lenovo ThinkPad 10 Ultrabook initially debuted in 2014 and now with Linux 5.9 debuting in late 2020 there is proper keyboard support, thanks to Red Hat's Hans de Goede who has frequently provided similar driver improvements for a range of hardware over the years.
Recently there have been a lot of open-source Linux patches flowing concerning Intel's bring-up of their DG1 discrete graphics card for developers. That work continued this week with the latest patches in wiring up LMEM support.
Among the recent Intel DG1 patches for Linux recently have been on the media driver front, compute runtime with OpenCL and Level Zero and as part of that the IGC support, and then most importantly the necessary Linux kernel changes building off the existing Gen12/Xe graphics support.
Working remote and looking for an open source video conferencing solution for hosting online meeting? Here are some of the best tools you can use.
GScan2PDF, graphical to produce PDFs or DjVus from scanned documents, released version 2.8.1 a day ago.
So the world has been hectic lately, dunno if you’ve seen the news, but that means that I didn’t publish an update since my previous KF6 progress report back in February! Now that the lock down has been (temporarily?) lifted where I live and that things are a bit less crazy, it’s time for an update.
An actual Qt 6 is not published yet and we didn’t branch for KF6 yet either. Still as can be seen on the KF6 Workboard there are plenty of tasks in our backlog which can be acted upon now. No need to wait to participate, all the work done now will make the transition to KF6 easier later on anyway.
What has been done since the last post?
On the workboard, we currently have 22 tasks in progress and 4 tasks done. Clearly that’s not a huge activity in more than four months but the state of the world might explain it in part. Obviously with so little tasks done, they mostly revolve around our usual suspects.
If you fancy becoming one of the unsung heroes of KDE, come and help working tasks from the KF6 Workboard! More hands are needed and right now is a good time to discover it and get into it than when Qt6 will be released. Indeed, when Qt6 will be around it will be much less quiet around here. :-)
A few months ago I wrote a new GStreamer plugin: an audio filter for live loudness normalization and automatic gain control.
The plugin can be found as part of the GStreamer Rust plugin in the audiofx plugin. It’s also included in the recent 0.6.0 release of the GStreamer Rust plugins and available from crates.io.
Its code is based on Kyle Swanson’s great FFmpeg filter af_loudnorm, about which he wrote some more technical details on his blog a few years back. I’m not going to repeat all that here, if you’re interested in those details and further links please read Kyle’s blog post.
F33 System-Wide Change: Make nano the default editor https://pagure.io/fesco/issue/2426 APPROVED (+8, 0, -0)
At this week's Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) meeting, more features were approved for the Fedora 33 release due out this fall.
Most notable is the change of the default terminal text editor with Fedora 33 but other changes were also accepted. Highlights of this week's FESCo decisions include:
- The change to make nano the default text editor was approved. Nano will be the new default over Vi.
New Debian GNU/Linux project leader Jonathan Carter is seeking to celebrate individual achievements as part of his effort to better publicise the project, one of the main goals he advanced as the reason for running for the post this year.
Carter won the election for leader in April. He has been occupied with a number of issues thereafter and hence his interview with iTWire — a regular feature for this site every year — was delayed a bit.
The first leader from South Africa, Carter, who is also known as highvoltage, said in his nomination email that he was contesting for the post because he felt Debian was worth protecting and it was worth working to make it an enjoyable and productive environment.
Mobian is an open-source project which is bringing the Debian GNU/Linux distributions to mobile devices such as tabs and phones.
This week Canonical and Google announced they were working together to bring the Flutter application toolkit to Ubuntu/Linux. Flutter is the cross-platform, open-source UI toolkit developed by Google for use from Android to Linux and iOS and Fuschia as well as for web interfaces.
Besides Canonical working on the Flutter Linux port to cater towards Snaps on Ubuntu, it also turns out they are working on bringing Flutter to Wayland... Through Mir, which in recent years has morphed into focusing on Wayland rather than as a competitor.
This weekend William Wold of Canonical who has been on the Mir team for a while shared that the Flutter Wayland support is under development. While Flutter on Linux relies on GTK for windowing, right now it only supports usage on X11.
The company can provide a complete software and hardware development kit with a Linux 4.4 BSP and Halley5 development board with an X2000 SoM with a wireless module fitted to a largish carrier board with Ethernet, USB, microphone, MicroSD card slot, I/O header, buttons and so on. The other side of the board is equipped with a dual-camera board and a Full HD AMOLED display.
Back in the early 2000s, we made a family decision to upgrade the living room stereo. The equipment in place at the time was based on a collection of gear that I had purchased some 20 years earlier when I first had a steady post-university income. That early collection could best be described as "industrial chic," most notably the Hafler amplifiers I had built from kits and the Polk speakers made from some kind of composite wood product and finished with an ugly faux-rosewood vinyl wrap. They produced decent sound, but the dorm-room-style decor just wasn't working out in the living room.
Those of you who remember the early 2000s will recall that most of the world was still consuming music on CD. Our family was no exception, and we ended up with a fine CD player that had an interesting feature—it was able to decode regular CDs as well as high-definition-compatible digital (HDCD) discs.
According to Wikipedia, HDCD is a proprietary audio encode-decode process that claims to provide increased dynamic range over that of standard Red Book audio CDs, while retaining backward compatibility with existing compact disc players.
Intel's open-source compiler engineers have been quite timely in getting the Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) support out in the relevant components since Intel formally outlined AMX in last month's programming reference manual.
It was just at the end of June that Intel provided more details on Advanced Matrix Extensions as their new paradigm for AI workloads and more. Following those details going public, patches to the GNU and LLVM compiler toolchains began while there has also been recent kernel work around the XSAVES support that is needed.
This is a bugfix release for gnunet and gnunet-gtk specifically. For gnunet, no changes to the source have been made. However, the default configuration had to be modified to support the changes made in 0.13.0. For gnunet-gtk, this fixes a more serious issue where the 0.13.0 tarball failed to build.
A new version of drat arrived on CRAN yesterday. Once again, this release is mostly the work of Felix Ernst who extended some work from the previous release, and added support for repository updates (outside of package insertion) and more.
drat stands for drat R Archive Template, and helps with easy-to-create and easy-to-use repositories for R packages. Since its inception in early 2015 it has found reasonably widespread adoption among R users because repositories with marked releases is the better way to distribute code.
As your mother told you: Friends don’t let friends install random git commit snapshots. Rolled-up releases it is. drat is easy to use, documented by five vignettes and just works.
"I write this to appeal, hell, plead, with my fellow Americans to pay attention to the suffering that exists all around us—to recognize our well, able-bodied privilege, and to come together to tear this cruel system down."
"It's consistently picking up. And it's picking up at the time you'd expect it to."
"It would have created a logistical nightmare for health insurers and individual enrollees and pushed abortion even further out of reach in the midst of a global pandemic that has upended our economy."
Almost 100 women in Cape Town who bake goods for Khayelitsha Cookies, a supplier to the hospitality industry, may lose their breadwinner status as the effect of the lockdown takes its toll.
Many South Africans would have seen the company's individually wrapped biscuits at tea and coffee stations in their hotel rooms, or in airport lounges, conference centres and large offices - a product which makes up over 65% of total revenue.
But when the lockdown was announced in March due to the Covid-19 pandemic, business all but ground to a halt.
With 9 generic companies licensed to manufacture and distribute the drug to 127 countries around the world, without even having to pay royalty to Gilead, one could be forgiven for thinking a substantial impact may be made in the attempts to address the global pandemic. Unfortunately, in terms of countries with Covid-19 cases, only 7 of the 30 worst affected countries are included in these Gilead-generic company licenses. These 7 are India, Pakistan, South Africa, Bangladesh, Egypt, Belarus, and Indonesia. US has Gilead of course, but not generic versions. And of course – these are only the ‘official’ numbers from these countries. Given that this sounds like a recipe for NOT really stopping the virus, it sounds like there will be plenty of profit to go around for a while. After all, if the disease keeps spreading, treatments will continue to be needed.
All of this, of course, is only about remdesivir – a drug that shows very moderate therapeutic benefits so far. What happens if/when a full treatment, or even vaccine, is developed? If it is developed in US – we already have an example of what path they may seek to follow. What about if it is developed in another country? Some observers are already warning about a global ‘hunger games’-esque future, with poor countries at the mercy of richer countries. It almost makes one nostalgic of the “Nexavar is only for western patients” times, when prohibitive pricing (and perhaps some variety of discrimination) was the only concern – and not defensive stockpiling, trade-wars and global buyouts!
Of course, as Mintze and t’Hoen point out, generic companies could start launching ‘at risk’ in these other countries, or apply for compulsory licences. And generics that have the gumption to ‘risk’ annoying Big Pharma may be well placed to do this. After all, if a country is being severely affected by the pandemic, and there is a globally announced shortage of the patented medicine declared – what better time is there to trigger a compulsory licence? It’s also a great time for countries to re-look at the access concerns that patent-linkage (linking regulatory approval with patent status) can cause, while also re-looking at the access benefits that local working requirements can bring. While ‘charity’ or ‘goodwill’ such as through Open-Covid pledges, patent pools, etc can play a large role in helping access concerns – it is high time that stronger legally enforceable public-interest centric policy levers are focused on, to change ‘access’ from a reactive-concern to a pro-active reality. After all, if US can find a way to take such strong ‘national interest’ measures, surely other countries can respond by taking their own ‘public interest’ measures!
Data science conference Spark+AI Summit is still in full swing. Organised by Spark experts Databricks, it naturally lent itself as a stage for some progress reports and letting the firm show off new products.
Amongst other things, machine learning platform MLflow has found a new home at the Linux Foundation. After being in the open for two years, the move provides the Databricks project with a new vendor neutral environment in the hopes that this will lead to higher adoption rates and more outside committers.
While this seems like a somewhat sensible thing to do, onlookers might wonder about the choice of foundation. After all, company co-founder and MLflow creator Matei Zaharia chose the Apache Software Foundation for Spark. A second glance however reveals that the Linux Foundation seems to become a bit of a default for Databricks in recent years, since the company’s Delta Lake was also handed over to the org last autumn.
The company had requested that its workers remove the app from their mobile devices due to "security risks," according to a memo to employees seen by Reuters.
NBC News has not seen the memo.
“We have identified a small number of Wells Fargo employees with corporate-owned devices who had installed the TikTok application on their device,” a Wells Fargo spokesperson said in an email to The Verge. “Due to concerns about TikTok’s privacy and security controls and practices, and because corporate-owned devices should be used for company business only, we have directed those employees to remove the app from their devices.”
Red Lines host Anya Parampil speaks with investigative journalist Gareth Porter about his latest report “How the Pentagon failed to sell Afghan government’s bunk ‘Bountygate’ story to US intelligence agencies.”
Waking up this morning and putting on the TV to see the news, instead I saw on BBC Breakfast a 30 minute piece on the role of a teenage girl in 1932 in helping her father do the maths to establish that the Spitfire needed eight .303 guns to deliver a sufficient weight of shot.
Well, it didn't cost him his life, but it cost him his career. On Wednesday, Vindman announced he was retiring. He had gotten word that pressure had been put on the Pentagon to remove him from the colonels list and effectively end his career. Vindman's lawyer, David Pressman, issued a statement explaining why he was retiring: "Through a campaign of bullying, intimidation, and retaliation, the President of the United States attempted to force LTC Vindman to choose: Between adhering to the law or pleasing a President. Between honoring his oath or protecting his career." Vindman had made his choice when he responded to a subpoena and testified last fall. In the administration of Donald Trump, telling the truth under oath was a career-killing offense.
An Army board had selected Vindman, along with hundreds of other officers, for promotion to full colonel. Normally, this is a routine bureaucratic process that requires the Army staff to forward the proposed list to the secretary of defense for review. It is then sent to the White House and subsequently to the Senate for final confirmation.
Aides to the president had made it clear that Trump did not want to see Vindman promoted. It has also been reported that the release of the promotion list was already being held up over Vindman. In order to avoid a public and embarrassing scene with Trump this summer, defense officials had told Vindman that they were considering forwarding his name on a special “list of one,” or holding his name back until after the election to avoid affecting the promotions of other officers. The White House had even asked Pentagon officials to find instances of misconduct and witnesses that would justify removing Vindman from the list. But Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy were unable to find reason to do this. Esper completed his review and forwarded the list, including Vindman’s name, to the White House on Monday.
We argue that two of the primary tech defense contractors, Microsoft and IBM, helped normalize their industry's suppression of human rights in exchange for market access. Despite the human rights messaging of Microsoft's head lawyer and lobbyist, the company has proactively suppressed dissent in Bing for more than a decade, and its subsidiary, LinkedIn, is infamous for doing the same; in early 2010 Bill Gates pointedly criticized Google for -- as it turns out, temporarily -- taking a principled stand for human rights. [19] IBM's "safe city" products are known to have involved a video surveillance system for strongman Rodrigo Duterte in Davao City. And IBM's CEO having directly led sales of cataloguing equipment for Nazi Germany, which directly contributed to the Holocaust, is still defended by the company.
Similarly, Perspecta, a close Hewlett Packard affiliate/spin-off that dominates our chart of tech defense contractors, incorporates components of both Computer Sciences Corporation, which helped charter CIA rendition flights to secret prisons, and QinetiQ North America. QinetiQ, the privatization of England's former Defense Evaluation and Research Agency, has had former CIA Chief who personally authorized his agency's use of torture on its board. [20]
Another tech defense contractor, Cisco, has been in court since 2013 for not only helping custom-build China's "Golden Shield" project -- commonly known as the "Great Firewall of China" -- but even purpose-building a censorship, video surveillance, and "forced conversion" module for suppressing a dissident religious minority. Some of Cisco's internal marketing materials mentioning this work even leaked the day before a Senate human rights hearing. And despite Google's 2010-2018 public stance against suppressing dissent, Google's former CEO, and primary interface to the DoD, Eric Schmidt, has defended complying with authoritarian demands since 2006. [21]
Companies and executives which comply with authoritarian demands are only openly criticized by the US national security community if they do not significantly interface with the DoD. When they are willing to partner with the DoD, as is the case with Eric Schmidt and Reid Hoffman, they are welcomed as leaders.
The next combat aircraft to enter the U.S. Air Force inventory will not be a manned sixth-generation fighter or even the Northrop Grumman B-21.
By fiscal 2023, the Air Force expects to deliver the first operational versions of a new unmanned aircraft system (UAS) called Skyborg, a provocative portmanteau blending the medium of flight with the contraction for a cybernetic organism.
The Skyborg family of aircraft is expected to fill an emerging “attritable” category for combat aircraft that blurs the line between a reusable UAS and a single-use cruise missile.
Each year, the total amount of electric and electronic equipment the world uses grows by 2.5 million tonnes. Phones, radios, toys, laptops – if it has a power or battery supply it’s likely to join a growing mountain of “e-waste” after use.
Jason Cardiff didn’t want his new business to end up like his last one, an alleged pyramid scheme involving robocalling and selling unwitting customers bogus remedies to lose weight or quit smoking. One of his ventures, Prolongz, falsely claimed to offer men “increased ejaculation control.”
“I am not going to lose another company,” Cardiff told his lawyer in an April 5 email, just before detailing a fantasy list of people he wanted to place on the board of his new venture, VPL Medical Inc.
When Denmark became the first of 22 European countries to reopen schools on April 15, students were told that wearing face masks was optional. But not everything went back to the way it had been before COVID-19.
Even after a pair of landmark decisions delivered by the Supreme Court, we still aren’t going to see the President’s financial records any time soon.
Online readers of the New York Times might have been forgiven if, when they got to the editorial section on June 24, they thought they had accidentally jumped to the website of Socialist Action, or at least The Nation. In a 2,600-word editorial headlined: “Opinion: The Jobs We Need,” the editorial board laid out a powerful case that “over the past four decades, American workers have suffered a devastating loss of economic power, manifested in their wages, benefits and working conditions.”
Two recent speeches by the president are "equally authentic Trump and each describes a country that only the Trump and his benighted followers can see."
"It is our obligation as citizens to organize and demand Trump's resignation and focus millions of voters on turning out the Trumpsters and their four-year Dark Age that is wrecking America."
"Trump's idiocy is, perhaps, unsurprising. But is there no one in Trump's orbit who saw (sees) that ignoring the virus will not revive the economy?"
Tens of thousands of demonstrators gathered in Russia’s Far Eastern city of Khabarovsk on Saturday, July 11, for an unpermitted protest against the arrest of their governor, Sergey Furgal. It was the biggest public assembly of its kind in the region’s history. Before the rally, messages circulated on social media and on public announcement boards in apartment lobbies, urging people to attend, reports the local news site DVHAB.RU. The city’s authorities tried to prevent the demonstration by fencing off Khabarovsk’s main square, where organizers planned to stage the protest, under the pretext that the area was being disinfected. This police tactic failed, and protests poured in not just from all around the city but from neighboring towns, as well.
The presidential campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden announced Friday that it had filled the positions of chief information security officer (CISO) and chief technology officer (CTO) in order to address potential cybersecurity threats to the campaign.
The campaign hired Chris DeRusha to serve as CISO and Jacky Chang as CTO. DeRusha previously served as chief security officer for the state of Michigan, and previously served in the White House and the Department of Homeland Security, along with leading Ford Motor Company’s enterprise vulnerability management program.
Welcome to the club. Post-colonial bullshit and racism have made my Sri Lankan passport worthless for years. Now the American passport is worse. America has crashed straight through the third world into the fourth.
Here is a list, in total, of all the places Americans can go. Most of them are small Caribbean islands.
American now have access to exactly two dozen states, five more (*) if they want to endure a 14-day quarantine on the end. Americans have gone from world power to getting the side-eye from Ecuador in a matter of months. Right now Americans are only really welcome on remote islands or at corralled resorts in Mexico, where they can be isolated from everyone else.
Though specific books were not mentioned in the directive, the news outlet said the ministry did provide schools with a list of books approved to replace the removed titles, which included writings by former Communist Party leader Mao Zedong. According to Reuters' review of social media posts by teachers in China since the directive was announced, religious texts and at least two of English author George Orwell's famous books—Animal Farm and 1984—were among those taken from some school libraries.
As schools reopened in China after the COVID-19 outbreak, they have thrown themselves into a nationwide exercise to remove books deemed politically incorrect, deepening Chinese President Xi Jinping’s push to instil patriotism and ideological purity in the education system.
A directive from the Ministry of Education last October called on elementary and middle schools to clear out books from their libraries including “illegal” and “inappropriate” works. Now teachers have removed books from schools in at least 30 of mainland China’s 33 provinces and municipalities, according to a Reuters review of social media posts, publicly available school and local government documents, and interviews with teachers.
On the morning of July 7, federal agents arrested Ivan Safronov, a longtime journalist who recently took a job as a communications adviser to Roscosmos head Dmitry Rogozin. Safronov is being charged with treason and faces up to 20 years in prison.€
This week’s release of the recommendations of the “Unity Task Force” made up of delegates from both the Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden camps marked an unprecedented attempt to formally unite the centrist and progressive wings of the Democratic Party. But it also crystallized the depth of their ideological disagreement, including within the world of organized labor.
An explosive Reuters investigation revealed Friday that a series of executions the Trump administration has planned for next week “will mark the culmination of a three-year campaign to line up a secret supply chain to make and test lethal injection drugs.”
"The president whose administration had peaceful protesters pepper sprayed in the name of 'law and order' has repeatedly stepped in to make sure his cronies don't see the consequences of their actions."
When I first started sharing the story of my son’s unjust 18-year incarceration, I felt confident that many people – particularly white people and people with political power – would not care at all about the situation of a Black woman and her son.
On this edition of the “Dissenter Weekly,” host and Shadowproof editor Kevin Gosztola provides an update on NSA whistleblower Reality Winner, who is incarcerated at FMC Carswell in Texas where a COVID-19 outbreak was confirmed.
Winner has spent the last months fighting for compassionate release into home confinement. She and her lawyers warned this would happen, and now, like all prisoners at Carswell, Winner’s safety is clearly in danger.
LeBron James says his thoughts on social justice can't be contained on the back of a basketball jersey.
The Los Angeles Lakers superstar won't wear one of the NBA-approved social justice messages on the back of his jersey when the NBA resumes competition later this month in the Orlando bubble.
John Eaken publicly displayed his cattle-foot-bath invention and then waited more than a year before filing a patent application. During that time, Eaken had called-up a patent attorney (Svendsen, then of Stratton Ballew) who spoke to Eaken before running a conflict check with the firm. During the call, Svendsen did not ask the status of invention development, or whether it had been on public use or display (or would be in the near future). Eaken then hired Svendsen
Eaken later learned that his public displays would limit his patent protection and then sued the firm for malpractice. The district court, however dismissed the case–holding that there was no duty-to-warn until the the creation of an attorney-client relationship and that the initial screening call did not create such a relationship.
On appeal, the Washington Court of Appeals has reversed — asking the lower court to delve deeper into whether an attorney-client relationship had been created.
[...]
One of the judges wrote in dissent — arguing that Eaken failed his burden of producing sufficient evidence to prove the existence of an attorney-client-relationship.
Note about the invention: The cattle-foot-bath seems all spa-like when you hear the name, but actually it is a mechanism for coating the feet with chemical fungicide (concentrated medicinal agent).
The German Federal Court of Justice announced that Judge Tim Crummenerl will join the 10th Civil Senate of this court. The Juve Patent blog brought this news and looked into the most prominent cases that Judge Crummenerl decided while at the Regional Court of Dusseldorf.
The election was supposed to take place in March. However, the coronavirus crisis meant the court postponed the election. Among the other candidates was Matthias Zigann, presiding judge of the 7th Civil Chamber at the Regional Court Munich. He is also a well-known patent judge.
The election of Crummenerl means he will now move to the 10th Civil Senate. In turn, this will give rise to staff changes in Düsseldorf.
The 10th Civil Senate at the Federal Court of Justice is Germany’s highest instance for patent infringement proceedings. Furthermore, the senate is also the appeal instance for patent revocation cases. It thus combines two separate strands of the German bifurcation system. The senate regularly sets important precedents in German and European patent law.
* WNTRESEARCH RECEIVES POSITIVE OPINION FROM THE EUROPEAN PATENT OFFICE, EPO, REGARDING FOXY-5 MANUFACTURING
* POSITIVE OPINION PROVIDES WNTRESEARCH WITH A CONSIDERABLE AND ENHANCED PROTECTION FOR MANUFACTURING OF FOXY-5 BEYOND 2035 Source text for Eikon: Further company coverage: (Gdansk Newsroom)
Anixa Biosciences, Inc. (NASDAQ: ANIX), a biotechnology company focused on the treatment and prevention of cancer and infectious diseases, today announced that the European Patent Office has issued an Intention to Grant notice for the first European patent covering Anixa's novel CAR-T cancer treatment technology, which has been licensed from The Wistar Institute and is being developed at the Moffitt Cancer Center.
The German Federal Ministry of Justice shows unexpected pace in repeating the legislative process for the German Act of Approval for the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA Approval Act). As we explained in our last post, the German Federal Constitutional Court ruled that UPCA Approval Act adopted by the German Parliament in March 2017 was null and void because it had not been voted by a two-thirds majority (it was adopted unanimously, but when the vote was taken at 1:30am only 35 out of 630 members of parliament were in attendance). In a letter dated 8 June 2020, the Federal Ministry of Justice invited patent law circles and associations to comment on the draft bill of the UPCA Approval Act (the substance of which is unchanged) by 3 July 2020.
Although the invitation is not a constitutional component of the legislative procedure as such, it is nevertheless to be taken as a clear indication that the German Bundestag will vote on the law again (probably within this legislative period ending in September 2021), with the express goal of achieving the two-third majority required by the Federal Constitutional Court.
The USPTO believed that “generic.com” domain names were almost always generic and therefore unregistrable. On that basis, it denied registration for Booking.com. The Supreme Court holds that generic.com domain names aren’t necessarily generic, which means they have the potential to become protectable trademarks and registrable.
Justice Ginsburg’s majority opinion holds: “Whether any given ‘generic.com’ term is generic…depends on whether consumers in fact perceive that term as the name of a class or, instead, as a term capable of distinguishing among members of the class.” A footnote explains that consumer perceptions can be demonstrated by consumer surveys, dictionaries, usage by consumers/competitors, and other sources.
Trademark attorneys who have a solid technology strategy can more easily beat down infringement but should avoid getting overwhelmed by too much information
Singer Anita White, who was sued by a country group over the use of the name Lady A, says the group is using their white privilege against her.
The band, who had previously been known as Lady Antebellum, filed a lawsuit in federal court on Wednesday seeking a ruling that their use of the trademark “Lady A" does not infringe on White's use of the same name. The band is not seeking monetary damages.
The China National Intellectual Property Administration (CNIPA) has published 38 rules on the criteria to determine trade mark infringement. These provide guidance on trade mark enforcement for authorities including the Administrations for Market Regulation.
They aim to standardise enforcement across the country and better protect the rights of trade mark holders. Until now, there had been inconsistency in the enforcement of trade marks under the Chinese Trademark Law.
The criteria were published on 15 June 2020.
Ms Haoyu Feng and Mr Tingxi Huo of the MARQUES China Team have published an article on the criteria, which is available for members to read on the China Team page here (MARQUES log in required). They have also prepared an English translation of the CNIPA Notice, which is available on the Team page.
Does the notion of ‘address’ only refer to one’s own postal address or does it also encompass one’s own email and IP address, as well as telephone number?
This, in a nutshell, is the question which the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) had been required to answer in Constantin Film v YouTube, C-264/19.
The referral, which Germany’s Federal Court of Justice had made, focused on the interpretation of Article 8(2)(a) of the Enforcement Directive, a piece of EU legislation adopted in 2004.
The background national proceedings had originated from the refusal, by YouTube and its parent company Google, to provide film producer Constantin Film with the email and IP addresses, as well as telephone numbers, of YouTube users who had uploaded on that platform unlawful copies of its films Parker and Scary Movie 5.
A few months ago - as The IPKat reported - Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard ÃËe advised the CJEU to rule that the notion of ‘address’ is limited to one’s own postal address, but that individual Member States could go beyond the Enforcement Directive (this is only aimed at providing a minimum harmonization between Member States’ law) and provide for more extensive obligations on infringers or other subjects, including online intermediaries and platforms.
File-hosting service Rapidgator has had millions of pages removed from Google's search results following complaints from copyright holders. However, the site is not just on the receiving end of takedown notices as it has started to send its own too, targeting 'premium link generators' and other problematic sites.
A lawsuit filed this week by Amazon Publishing, Penguin Random House and authors including Lee Child and John Grisham, has chalked up an early win. A Washington court has ordered that the assets and domains of Kiss Library, which is accused of massive copyright infringement, should be seized as part of a temporary restraining order.
