As of today, Linux Journal is back, and operating under the ownership of Slashdot Media.
As Linux enthusiasts and long-time fans of Linux Journal, we were disappointed to hear about Linux Journal closing it's doors last year. It took some time, but fortunately we were able to get a deal done that allows us to keep Linux Journal alive now and indefinitely. It's important that amazing resources like Linux Journal never disappear.
We will begin publishing digital content again as soon as we can. If you're a former Linux Journal contributor or a Linux enthusiast that would like to get involved, please contact us and let us know the capacity in which you'd like to contribute. We're looking for people to cover Linux news, create Linux guides, and moderate the community and comments. We'd also appreciate any other ideas or feedback you might have. Right now, we don't have any immediate plans to resurrect the subscription/issue model, and will be publishing exclusively on LinuxJournal.com free of charge. Our immediate goal is to familiarize ourself with the Linux Journal website and ensure it doesn't ever get shut down again.
What a surprise it was when I noticed on Twitter earlier this afternoon that “Linux Journal is back.” Before we get too excited, I need to make it known that this is not the same Linux Journal from before. The link to the full article can be found on the Linux Journal website.
[...]
I want to wish Slashdot Media all the best as they help to not only preserve what is there but also continue the tradition of bringing quality content to Linux and Open Source readers.
The Librem 14 is going to be a powerhouse with a six core, twelve thread, 4.70Ghz i7-10710U tenth generation Intel CPU. When we first announced the Librem 14 pre-order, we estimated shipping would begin in early Q4 2020 but unfortunately Intel has industry-wide supply issues with the i7-10th gen CPUs which has moved the ship date for the Librem 14 to December 2020.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that the current $100 pre-order sale will continue for a bit longer. We also hope to finish some fresh Librem 14 prototypes in about a week, so we can share new pictures of the design.
This release contains bug fixes to improve robustness. This release note describes what’s different between Istio 1.6.9 and Istio 1.6.10.
Four days ago, the well-known Gnome environment came with a new release.
I keep hearing all this talk about a Gnome OS and so many people aren't bothering to read past the title and think this is somehow going to be some new major Linux distribution, it's not, it was never going to be and that was never the point of it.
As the use of Linux has grown, the number and variety of contributors has done likewise. The study found that from 2007 to 2019, there were 780,048 commits accepted into the Linux kernel from 1730 organisations. The top 20 can be seen in the chart in this article.
In this table, unknown refers to contributions for which a supporting employer’s existence could not be determined. None indicates the patches are from developers known to be working on their own time.
The release model for the kernel now has four categories; Prepatch (or “-rc”) kernels, Mainline, Stable, and Long Term Stable. Each release cycle begins with a two-week “merge window” when new features can be reviewed and then included in the git repository for the next release.
The latest enablement work landing in the RadeonSI Gallium3D open-source driver is for AMD Dimgrey Cavefish and VanGogh.
Merged today to Mesa 20.3-devel was VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish support.
VanGogh and Dimgrey Cavefish are both GFX10.3 (Navi 2) parts. Van Gogh has been rumored for a while as a next-gen mobile API with Zen 2 CPU cores and RDNA2 graphics in the 7.5~18 Watt TDP space. Details on Dimgrey Cavefish are light as it's another Linux-specific codename for a Navi 2 part in following the X.Org color + fish family naming convention.
Cantata, Qt5 graphical client for Music Player Daemon (MPD), released version 2.4.2 with various fixes. PPA updated for Ubuntu 20.04, Linux Mint 20, and derivatives.
Cantata 2.4.2 is primarily a stability improvements and bug-fixes release that features.
Naturally changes are coming, as are new features and toolsets to ‘provide a fresh and innovative creative environment’ for content creators.
A major update to Lightworks, the first under its new owners, will be available to download in November.
It’s not clear (yet) wether Lightworks will remain a “freemium” app (it’s free to download and use but a license is required to unlock 1080p exporting) or if it will be made open source (something Editshare had on their roadmap).
Despite being one of best video editors for Linux (it’s available for macOS and Windows too) Lightworks has never quite achieved the sort of user-base that other (equally free) video editors have among ‘hobbyist’ editors.
But with the right direction the editor could yet cut through its pro-level competition to better meet the needs demanded by modern content production.
Or to put it another way: Lightworks is once again a core software product and not just an extra in someone else’s film.
Dino is a privacy-focused lightweight open-source messenger for Linux desktops.
It supports end-to-end encryption out-of-the-box via OMEMO or OpenPGP encryption.
In addition to its strong encryption, Dino allows the user to disable read and typing notification either globally or for specific contacts.
Currently, Dino offers several distribution packages for all popular Linux and Unix distributions: Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Arch Linux, Void Linux, Alpine Linux, NixOS, Guix and finally FreeBSD (Unix).
Available now in Early Access, the online platformer shooter Soldat 2 brings in the full charm of the original classic that took the early internet by storm and will continue to expand it.
If you played the original - right now it's very much as you expect. Fast paced, ridiculous, seriously easy to get into and really rather fun. You can't ask for much more in a military-style platformer shooter, it does exactly what it sets out to do. You run, you throw a grenade, you spray and pray and hopefully get a few frags along the way. Slightly prettier than the original but still just as insane.
[...]
Plenty more is to come including more of pretty much everything: levels, weapons, vehicles - you name it and it probably will get it at some point. The big idea with Soldat 2 is to be a platform for others to create, as much as it is a game itself so it's going to have full modding support for all sorts of community content.
Thanks to the feedback & patches provided by others, I found a bit more motivation to take a look at the small things that seems to be odd in KTextEditor.
Interesting enough, if you once notice a small detail (like a dead pixel on your display you suddenly find after years of use), it really sticks out like a sore thumb…
Here two small things that caught my interest this week.
Earlier this year I started a branch to track GTK 4 development which is targeted for release by end-of-year. I just merged it which means that our recently released gtksourceview-4-8 branch is going to be our LTS for GTK 3. As you might remember from the previous maintainer, GtkSourceView 4.x is the continuation of the GtkSourceView 3.x API with all the deprecated API removed and a number of API improvements.
Currently, GtkSourceView.Next is 5.x targeting the GTK 4.x API. It’s a bit of an unfortunate number clash, but it’s been fine for WebKit so we’ll see how it goes.
It’s really important that we start getting solid testing because GtkSourceView is used all over the place and is one of those “must have” dependencies when moving to a new GTK major ABI.
While you’re probably enjoying your Linux Lite 5.0 installation, work has begun on the next major release, Linux Lite 5.2, which will be based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 20.04.1 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system and the long-term supported Linux 5.4 kernel series. As usual, there are also various improvements and new features.
For example, Linux Lite 5.2 will now let users manage the Firewall and Lite Widget settings from the Settings Manager, show laptop battery status in the Lite Widget, as well as to restore the Taskbar and system tray icons to default from the Lite Tweaks utility.
Windows 7 and Windows 10 aren't terrible operating systems. In fact, they are both very good. With that said, the newest version of Windows 10 has many bugs. Unfortunately, since Windows 7 is no longer supported, its users are stuck in a conundrum. They have to decide whether to use an unsupported Windows 7 or upgrade to Windows 10 that is full of telemetry and other "spying" that passes their information to Microsoft's servers. That is a very difficult decision.
Thankfully, there is a better option -- just switch to Linux! Yes, modern Linux-based operating systems will be supported (unlike the now-obsolete Windows 7) and most will run great on aging hardware (unlike Windows 10). Linux Lite is one of the best Linux distributions for Windows-switchers, as it is lightweight, modern, and familiar.
One of the coolest things about Puppy Linux is that it’s a modular distribution, which means that it lets users swap out the kernel, apps and firmware in seconds. One top of that, it can be turned very easily into a minimal bare bones version just by removing a single file, followed by a reboot, of course.
As its codename suggests, Puppy Linux 9.5 is based on Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa) operating system series. This means that users will have access to the official Ubuntu 20.04 LTS software repositories to install any packages they want.
Our vision for the SUSE Cloud Application Platform Deployment tool is to provide the simplest experience possible and do so across a variety of supported cloud service providers. Since my last post we’ve made some significant strides, so it’s time to catch up on our status.
A lot of work has gone into the labeling UI for IBM Maximo Visual Inspection (MVI). However, there are situations where you want to work with an already existing dataset that was created outside of MVI. Thankfully, MVI already supports importing COCO datasets, label information and all. That’s easy enough. But what if you want to modify or add some images before importing that dataset? Maybe you have some colleagues without access to MVI who need you to keep things in a common format? Or maybe there are other tools that interact with these datasets? We can’t expect everyone else to use MVI’s dataset format.
I’m hoping this post will help you along in figuring how to do what you need to do outside of MVI. We’re going to create our own little COCO dataset with LabelMe and LabelMe2coco, and turn that into an MVI dataset that we can train MVI models with.
The impact: That is an epic list of achievements on behalf of all of us that use Linux on the desktop. Kudos and thank you to the Fedora Desktop team!
The biggest news in this release is, of course, the support for new devices. You can now install the Ubuntu Touch mobile operating system on the Sony Xperia X, Sony Xperia X Compact, Sony Xperia X Performance, Sony Xperia XZ, OnePlus 3, and OnePlus 3T smartphones using the official UBports Installer.
This update also incorporates the QtWebEngine 5.14 components, which updates the built-in Morph Browser to the latest Chromium version, making it up to 25% faster across all devices and enabling support for selecting only the text you want from web pages using the touch handles, as well as to open downloaded PDF, TXT, IMG or MP3 files directly in the browser.
Microchip has introduced a free, open source “Ensemble Graphics Toolkit” running on Linux for building C++ based GUIs for its Cortex-A5 SAMA5 and Arm9 SAM9 SoCs.
Microchip has released a free, Apache 2.0 licensed C++ GUI suite for the Linux-powered, single-core, 32-bit SoCs it received from its acquisition of Atmel. The Ensemble Graphics Toolkit (EGT), which is now integrated with Microchip’s Linux4SAM distribution, is designed for Cortex-A5 based SAMA5 SoCs such as the SAMA5D27, which is found on its SAMA5D27 SOM SiP module. It also supports Arm9-based SAM9 SoCs such as the 600MHz SAM9X60 SoC that was announced in March.
At Purism, we do all our videos and other promotional material internally, with Librem hardware and free software only. This is part of our policy and I think it’s important, when I believe in something, to act in accordance with it.
A few days after releasing the video of the Librem 5 hardware design, I was asked by a few people to publish an article describing the process of making this video.
In early 2019, we shot a funny commercial for Librem One and I made a blog post, along with a video, to explain the process of making this kind of commercial with Librem hardware and free software. I was not going to do a “behind the scenes” blog post again but the Librem 5 video is entirely made with 3D graphics and the workflow is quite different so I think that it is interesting to describe that process in a new post.
A modern enthusiast will scoff at the concept of a Chromebook – limited performance, capabilities, and a simplistic OS for doing some serious work? The fact is that the Chromebook, and Chrome OS, have been gazumping good portions of the notebook market share in recent years, mostly down to its stripped down nature but also the low pricing. In 2019 AMD relaunched its older A-series APUs for Chromebooks, meeting that market need. However, at CES this year we saw the first indication of premium $700+ Chromebooks from Intel. Now AMD is moving into a higher performance space with its Chromebook offerings with new optimized Ryzen hardware and Vega graphics.
[...]
AMD claims to have a 21% market share in the Chromebook space, using IDC data, and Chromebooks currently account for 18% of all notebook sales. The market is largely split into three categories: education, enterprise, and consumer, with education seeing a big uplift in recent months due to the pandemic. Also because of the pandemic, as well as the growth of Chromebooks as a viable tool for these markets, use-cases are expanding with new productivity applications becoming available as well as the need to drive multiple high resolution displays.
AMD today announced the Ryzen 3000 and Athlon 3000 C-Series processors for use in Google Chromebooks from multiple vendors.
AMD announced these 3000 C-Series mobile processors as the first Zen optimized Chromebook processors with Acer, ASUS, HP, and Lenovo all committing to releasing AMD Chromebooks in Q4'2020.
Compared to the previous-generation AMD A-Series "Excavator" APUs in Chromebooks, AMD is promoting up to 251% better graphics performance, up to 104% faster productivity, and up to 152% better photo editing with these new Zen C-Series processors.
OnLogic has launched a line of AMD servers, including two with 2nd Gen Epyc and three with Ryzen 3000, including a $1,547 and up Compact Industrial AMD Ryzen Edge Server. Meanwhile, AMD launched some 15W mobile Ryzen C-series chips.
OnLogic and AMD, which last year teamed up on promoting OnLogic mini-PCs based on AMD’s Ryzen Embedded V1000 and R1000 SoCs, are now collaborating on OnLogic’s new lineup of servers based on 2nd Gen Epyc and AMD Ryzen 3000 processors. Most of these are rackmount servers that are beyond our typical product coverage, but we are intrigued by the desktop form-factor Compact Industrial AMD Ryzen Edge Server (MC850-40), which blurs the line with the high-end embedded edge servers.
[...]
AMD’s Eypc Embedded SoCs are scaled down versions of the 2nd Gen Epyc SoCs used by OnLogic’s new rackmount systems: the 2U, $2,887 and up MK200-60 and 4U, $5,051 and up MK400-60. These “Eypc Edge Servers” tap the Epyc Rome 7002 in up to 32- and 64-core configurations, respectively, with up to 256GB RAM.
Sfera Labs’ “Iono Pi Max” industrial controller runs Linux on a RPi Compute Module 3+ and offers 10/100 LAN, 3x USB, isolated CAN and serial, relay and analog I/Os, plus RTC, UPS, and more.
Sfera Labs has launched an Iono Pi Max edge computing and industrial controller that “combines the high-reliability and bus interfaces of the Strato Pi product line with the I/O capabilities of Iono Pi.” We covered both the Strato Pi CAN and Iono Pi add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi in our 2017 Strato Pi CAN report.
Cassettes (if you remember those) are normally used to play back music and other audio, but what about using an old Walkman-style tape player as the instrument itself? That’s exactly what this project by Zack Scholl allows you to do, varying the playback speed to modify pitch output.
It’s a very simple setup, requiring one to hook up wires that enable an Arduino Uno and MCP4725 DAC to adjust the speed using a voltage input. A drone sound is recorded on the tape, which may also involve some hacking depending on your equipment.
Mozilla Firefox 81 has been released and it features some genuinely useful improvements.
I know I probably say the same thing ever release, but last month’s Firefox 80 was a very low-key release for such a high-key milestone.
Thankfully Mozilla has delivered plenty to talk about in the latest update.
For instance, the famed open source web browser now lets you to pause/play audio and video in Firefox using keyboard shortcuts (physical ones), via MPRIS (e.g., sound menu), or using a connected headset (assuming it has player controls).
Mozilla and the Hubs team takes internet security seriously. We do our best to follow best practices for web security and securing data. This post will provide an overview of how we secure access to your rooms and your data.
[...]
When you deploy your own Hubs Cloud instance, you have full control over the instance and its data via AWS or DigitalOcean infrastructure--Mozilla simply provides the template and automatic updates. Therefore, you can integrate your own security measures and technology as you like. Everyone’s use case is different. Hubs cloud is an as-is product, and we’re unable to predict the performance as you make changes to the template.
Server access is limited by SSH and sometimes two-factor authentication. For additional security, you can set stack template rules to restrict which IP addresses can SSH into the server.
At the end of 2019, if you were using Firefox to watch a video, you saw a new blue control with a simple label: “Picture-in-Picture.” Even after observing and carefully crafting the feature with feedback from in-progress versions of Firefox (Nightly and Beta), our Firefox team wasn’t really sure how people would react to it. So we were thrilled when we saw signals that the response was positive.
Hello everyone,
After some delay, the llvmorg-11.0.0-rc3 tag was just created.
Source code and docs are available at https://prereleases.llvm.org/11.0.0/#rc3 and https://github.com/llvm/llvm-project/releases/tag/llvmorg-11.0.0-rc3
Pre-built binaries will be added as they become ready.
Please file bug reports for any issues you find as blockers of https://llvm.org/pr46725
Release testers: please start your engines, run the script, share your results, and upload binaries. And thank you very much for your help so far.
There are currently no open release blockers, so unless anything new and bad comes up, this is what the final release will look like.
Thanks, Hans
LLVM 11.0 was originally scheduled to be released at the end of August while now it looks like that official milestone is coming in the next few days or week.
Tagged today was LLVM 11.0-RC3 as the belated extra release candidate for this half-year update to the LLVM compiler infrastructure and subprojects like Clang, LLD, FLANG, and libcxx, among others.
D is a general-purpose systems programming language with a C-like syntax that compiles to native code.
It is statically typed and supports both automatic (garbage collected) and manual memory management.
D programs are structured as modules that can be compiled separately and linked with external libraries to create native libraries or executables.
Back in Februrary I posted an article in which I promised a follow up telling you how I now manage my certificates. We’ll all these months later I’ve finally published it to dev.to (to push its reach beyond just Perl) https://dev.to/joelaberger/no-magic-letsencrypt-certbot-and-nginx-configuration-recipe-3a97 .
we want to try a new experiment and run an “Ask me Anything” (AMA) this Thursday to answer questions you may have, share our knowledge or help you in planning your online event.
Writing asynchronous code gives you the ability to speed up your application with little effort. With Django 3.1 finally supporting async views, middleware, and tests, now's a great time to get them under your belt.
If you want to make a single attribute read-only on a class, the easiest way to do it is to make a property representing your attribute.
Linked lists are like a lesser-known cousin of lists. They’re not as popular or as cool, and you might not even remember them from your algorithms class. But in the right context, they can really shine. If you’re looking to brush up on your coding skills for a job interview, or if you want to learn more about Python data structures besides the usual dictionaries and lists, then you’ve come to the right place!
The Python Software Foundation is excited to announce the re-opening of its Grants Program!
The pandemic negatively affected the PSF’s finances with the cancellation of PyCon 2020’s in-person conference and lower donations. Thanks to PyCon 2020 Online sponsors, donors, and our financial reserve, we are able to continue to support the Python community!
Earlier this year, Noel O'Boyle wrote the essay Python patterns for processing large SDF files and Richard Apodaca wrote Reading Large SDfiles in Rust. In this essay I'll show some examples of using chemfp's text toolkit API to extract non-chemical/near-chemical data from SDF records. The next essay will be a short one on read_sdf_ids_and_values(), followed by one which is more chemisty focused.
In this tutorial, you will learn how to add an image to your panel so that you have a background image to put your widgets on.
Nelson Mandela once said: "Music is a great blessing. It has the power to elevate and liberate us … It can unite us to sing with one voice.”
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its Introduction to Linux training course on the edX platform, currently in its sixth edition, has surpassed one million enrollments. The course helps students develop a good working knowledge of Linux using both the graphical interface and command line across the major Linux distribution families. No prior knowledge or experience is required, making the course a popular first step for individuals interested in pursuing a career in IT.
Of course, now, that little operating system runs the web, rules supercomputing, powers the cloud, keeps Android smartphones working, and even shows up on a few desktops. What really brings people to this class, though, is good old filthy lucre.
The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit organization enabling mass innovation through open source, today announced its Introduction to Linux training course on the edX platform, currently in its sixth edition, has surpassed one million enrollments. The course helps students develop a good working knowledge of Linux using both the graphical interface and command line across the major Linux distribution families. No prior knowledge or experience is required, making the course a popular first step for individuals interested in pursuing a career in IT.
With the evolution of the internet, security threats have also risen to a great extent.
[...]
SSL is the digital certificate known as the “Secure Socket Layer” that provides the foundation for stronger security on a website. It acts as a shield and safeguard when sensitive information travels from one place to another between computers/servers. SSL can be defined as trustworthy files that cryptographically form an encrypted link between a browser and a web server.
Any information that is sent or received on a page that is not secure can be hacked and intercepted by cyber-criminals and hackers. Important information, such as bank transaction details and personal details become accessible to hackers.
A website that is encrypted with SSL binds a secure connection between the web browser and servers to ensure that no third party has access to your information.
Cynet has released a report detailing changes in cyberattacks observed across North America and Europe since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Cynet compared the number of cyberattacks during the COVID-19 outbreak to the previous three months for several industry sectors and saw increases of more than 20 percent in the areas of finance (up 32%), food production (29%), and retail (23%).
The explosion of data in today's computing landscape has fueled the need for even greater security to protect the applications and workloads, and is crucial to an organization's success and competitive advantage. This is equally true when running compute intensive high performance computing (HPC) applications that consume large amounts of data, which are critical to an organization’s business or research endeavors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure provides a platform that can help keep HPC systems secure and improve the speed and stability of applications.
Security patch management is a challenge given the sheer number of instances in HPC clustered environments. Often, HPC environments are left unpatched for long periods of time, leaving systems exposed due to delays caused by complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive patch management processes. We'll describe three ways in which this is addressed with Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.
[...]
Ksplice, Autonomous Linux, and the OS Management service are provided for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure customers at no additional cost. Oracle Linux HPC customers on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure enjoy additional benefits including free Oracle Linux Premier Support and price per performance advantages. Additionally, Oracle Linux is 100% application binary compatible with RHEL. This means that RHEL customers on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure can eliminate support fees by easily switching to Oracle Linux.
HPC customers who leverage these advanced Linux patching technologies in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure benefit from improved system security, reduced downtime, simplified operations, and cost savings. To learn more about Oracle Cloud patch management options, sign up for an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure account today and take advantage of free cloud credits.
A staff of one of the nation’s electricity distribution companies, DISCOs, has been arrested by the Police in Lagos for allegedly drugging and defiling a 14-year-old girl in the Ejigbo area of Lagos.
The exhibition is curated by Almaty-based arts hub Aspan Gallery, and is the gallery’s first project in the UK. The artists’ work will be on show at London’s Cromwell Place, and will be open to the public for free.
The project brings together Almagul Menlibayeva and Yerbossyn Meldibekov, two Kazakh artists born in the 1960s whose art broke away from the socialist realist conventions of the Soviet era. Menlibayeva’s work fuses video and photography to create telling artworks that explore the female identity in the context of the migration stories of Central Asia, mirroring them with the contemporary migrant crisis.
In Poland, dozens of small towns have declared themselves free of "LGBT ideology". Politicians' hostility to gay rights has become a flashpoint, pitting the religious right against more liberal-minded Poles. And gay people living in these areas are faced with a choice: emigrate, keep their heads down - or fight back, writes Lucy Ash.
Quite often, the threshold for establishing that a reference is analogous art seems to be rather low. Patent applicants generally wish to obtain a broad scope of protection for their inventions, and do not wish to unduly limit the fields of use of their inventions. Accordingly, patent specifications tend to be drafted in a way to maximize the applicability of the inventions to different fields, or at least in a way not to limit the applicability to a narrow field. Thus, the field of endeavor of a claimed invention often is broad.
For the same reason, when issued patents or published patent applications are cited as prior art, these references also tend to describe applicability to broad fields of endeavor, rather than applicability only to a narrow field. Thus, when considering the obviousness of a claimed invention over prior art, often it is easy to find overlap between the field of endeavor of the claimed invention and the field of endeavor of a reference.
Despite this seemingly low threshold for establishing that a reference is analogous art, there is still a threshold. This is illustrated in the recent Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“Board”) case of Ex parte Sokoly.
[...]
Since Zupan’s device was in a different field of endeavor than the claimed hanger (and the examiner had not addressed the second prong of analogous art: whether the reference is reasonably pertinent to the problem faced by the inventor), the Board concluded that Zupan was non-analogous art. The Board also noted that the Bogaerts reference disclosed tie down clips for roof tiles, similar to Zupan, and thus also was non-analogous art. Accordingly, the Board reversed the obviousness rejections.
Takeaway: In an obviousness rejection, the threshold for establishing that a reference is analogous art often seems to be quite low. However, when an examiner rejects a claim as obvious, based on a reference that is neither from the same field of endeavor as the claimed invention, nor reasonably pertinent to the problem faced by the inventor, it is worth arguing that the rejection is improper because the reference is non-analogous art.
Law360 (September 21, 2020, 3:39 PM EDT) -- On Aug. 26, the U.K. Supreme Court handed down its long-awaited decision in the joined cases of Unwired Planet International Ltd. v. Huawei Technologies (UK) Co. Ltd.; Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. v. Conversant Wireless Licensing SÃâ¬RL.; and ZTE Corp. v. Conversant Wireless Licensing SÃâ¬RL.[1]
The decision, which I will refer to as Unwired Planet, has the potential to make the Patents Court of England and Wales the go-to forum for owners of standard-essential patents, regardless of their own domicile, who want a court to establish the terms of a global license for their technology.
Last week the company’s subsidiary ATCOR was granted a new patent by the European Patent Office (EPO) to protect the intellectual property (IP) for the company’s proprietary SphygmoCor technology used in cuff-based blood pressure devices.
Patent EP2566387 specifically covers non-invasively estimating the heart’s pressure and pressure waveform with features related to cardiac function and arterial properties using a conventional BP cuff inflated to low pressure.
Google’s business pervades the lives of most Americans, including most citizens of the E.D. of Texas. Google has millions of customers in the district; serves terabytes of data to, from, and within the district; and keeps detailed files on the activities of its citizens. Google also has lots of Texas lawyers. Google is doing everything it can to move this case out of E.D.Texas. The reality is though that Google doesn’t mind being in Texas, it just doesn’t want Texas style justice — where patent cases are on a direct path to a jury trial.
[...]
Id. Under this test, Google argues that it should not be sued for patent infringement in E.D. Texas.
A rare thing happened at the Federal Circuit today. The court heard oral argument on a petition for a writ of mandamus. The petition was filed by the tech behemoth, Apple, in a patent infringement case filed against it in the Western District of Texas. In the petition, Apple seeks an order sending the case to the Northern District of California under 28 U.S.C. €§ 1404, which permits transfer “[f]or the convenience of parties and witnesses, in the interest of justice.”
Though transfer petitions are relatively common in patent cases, the Federal Circuit almost always decides them on the briefs alone. That the court scheduled oral argument—in a case arising out of the Western District of Texas, no less—has been interpreted as reflecting concern by the Federal Circuit about the judge shopping occurring in the Western District.
As Jonas Anderson and I showed in a recent Patently-O post and discuss in more detail in a draft article, the Western District’s case assignment rules permit plaintiffs to predict, with absolute certainty, which judge will hear their case. And plaintiffs are overwhelmingly choosing Judge Alan Albright, whose procedural rules and substantive decisions they find quite favorable.
That said, the Federal Circuit’s decision to hold oral argument on Apple’s petition could also reflect the fact that, in the midst of the COVID pandemic, it’s a pretty easy thing to do. For the past six months—and for the foreseeable future—the Federal Circuit has been conducting oral argument entirely by telephone. Indeed, that’s how I was able to listen to today’s arguments, live.
I’ve written a few posts about how I used specif.io to draft a patent application: I submitted a claim I’d found in a published application and the service drafted a 15-page spec, and created two figures. Plainly, I invented nothing but assume for a moment I’d invented what had been claimed and that there was more disclosed in the spec than what I’d invented — the latter I think is fact but let’s assume it. Let’s also assume that I add claim 2 once I see the machine has conceived of something more than I had thought of. So: claim 1 is my invention; claim 2 is not. I hire you to represent me.
The USPTO, the EPO, and the UKIPO have all stated (here, here, and here in respective orders) that only natural people can be inventors. Fair enough. The USPTO has stated that a person who is not an inventor cannot be named. Also fair enough, because of the statute and 102(f). So… what do you do?
With my hypo, I think you have to name me since I invented what was in claim one. I guess you don’t have non-joinder because the machine invented whatever else is in the spec and you can’t name it.
We previously reported here that the EPO and UKIPO had refused two applications in which the inventor was identified as AI machine “DABUS”, stating that the inventor had to be a natural person.
Both jurisdictions have now published their detailed reasoning, and we can take a look at what led to these decisions. As there is nothing explicit regarding the nature of the inventor in either the European Patents Convention (EPC) or the UK Patents Act, the two jurisdictions have reasoned this in different ways, ultimately coming to the same conclusion: an inventor must be a natural person.
The two applications were filed with the name of Dr. Thaler as the applicant. The machine DABUS was identified as the inventor, and Dr. Thaler stated that the applicant derived the right to be granted a patent for the invention by virtue of ownership of the machine.
The EPO
The EPO noted that various national courts have issued decisions supporting an interpretation of the term inventor as referring to a natural person, and that this therefore appears to be an internationally accepted principle.
It is compulsory to designate the inventor of a patent application, and that status has certain legal rights attached to it which require a legal personality to exercise. A legal personality is something that a machine does not have, and the EPO stated that giving a name to the machine does not overcome this issue.
On 7 September 2020, the UK government published a call for views on the future relationship between artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property (IP). Though the government called for views on all areas of intellectual property law, this article shall focus on patent law.
In 2019, patent applications were filed in parallel at the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO), European Patent Office (EPO), and US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) by a physicist named Stephen Thaler, who claimed that his AI creation, DABUS, had produced inventions on its own initiative. All three jurisdictions refused Thaler’s application. The DABUS decisions confirmed that, for the purpose of patents, an inventor must be a natural person, i.e., a human. Proponents of these decisions argue that AI is no different to utilizing existing tools such as a microscope or computer.
Counsel in the automotive and home appliances industries assess AI inventorship and ask whether examination guidelines need further change
[...]
“There is a risk in accepting a concept of an AI legal person,” Huang explained. “The extreme diversity of AI-based products will in turn lead to an extreme diversity of ‘e-personalities’. It would be very difficult to harmonise these concepts into one definition of an ‘AI legal person’.
There's further escalation in the standards-essential patent (SEP) conflict between the abusive Avanci gang and the 21st century's most innovative automotive company, Tesla:
After Conversant Wireless's patent infringement complaints against Tesla in the Western District of Texas and the Mannheim Regional Court, a request for a Japanese import ban by Sharp, and Sisvel doubled down on its litigation campaign against Tesla in the District of Delaware, the affiliated patent trolls named Optis Wireless, PanOptis, and Unwired Planet have just filed a patent infringement suit against Tesla in the Eastern District of Texas over four former Panasonic patents and one former Ericsson patents, all of them declared to be essential to cellular telecommunications standards...
[...]
The day after tomorrow, the Munich I Regional Court will hold a trial over one of various patent infringement cases brought by another privateer (a patent troll fed by a large company with patents for the purpose of extracting higher royalties than otherwise), Conversant Wireless, against Daimler. As I noted in the previous post, the patent-in-suit in that case is now also being asserted against Tesla in a differnet German court (Mannheim). The Munich decision in the Daimler case won't be formally binding on the Mannheim court in any way, but should Daimler lose in Munich, Tesla would have to convince the Mannheim judges that their Munich-based colleagues made a mistake.
