We had a full week of Linux distro releases with Fedora 34, KaOS 2021.04, Makulu Linux 2021-04-27, openSUSE 15.3 RC, Elementary OS 6.0 Beta, OpenIndiana 2021.04, antiX 19.4-testing and Artix Linux 20210426 have been released this week.
Josh and Kurt talk about the University of Minnesota experimenting on the Linux Kernel. There’s a lot to unpack in this one, but the TL;DR is you probably don’t want to experiment on the kernel.
A spicy mix of distro news, including Rocky Linux's first milestone release, and our follow-up on the University of Minnesota’s kernel ban.
Plus a major step in Apple M1 GPU support.
**ccache** and **clisp** from the **d** software series of Slackware. Here is a quick and simple dice roller script done in Lisp: #!/usr/bin/clisp (defun roller (num) (pprint (random (parse-integer (nth 0 num)))) ) (setf userput *args*) (setf *random-state* (make-random-state t)) (roller userput)
I'm announcing the release of the 5.12.1 kernel.
All users of the 5.12 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.12.y git tree can be found at: git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.12.y and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser: https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
The OrangeFS open-source parallel file-system designed for cluster computing has a huge performance improvement to its read speeds with Linux 5.13.
OrangeFS with Linux 5.13 is introducing a new readahead implementation. Due to the existing code having gone stale and "is a trainwreck now", a new OrangeFS readahead implementation was written using XArray and the logic reworked significantly.
After beginning a compiler for the Apple M1 GPU, the next step is to develop a graphics driver exercising the compiler. Since the last post two weeks ago, I’ve begun a Gallium driver for the M1, implementing much of the OpenGL 2.1 and ES 2.0 specifications. With the compiler and driver together, we’re now able to run OpenGL workloads like glxgears and scenes from glmark2 on the M1 with an open source stack. We are passing about 75% of the OpenGL ES 2.0 tests in the drawElements Quality Program used to establish Khronos conformance. To top it off, the compiler and driver are now being upstreamed in Mesa!
Gallium is a driver framework inside Mesa. It splits drivers into frontends, like OpenGL and OpenCL, and backends, like Intel and AMD. In between, Gallium has a common caching system for graphics and compute state, reducing the CPU overhead of every Gallium driver. The code sharing, central to Gallium’s design, allows high-performance drivers to be written at a low cost. For us, that means we can focus on writing a Gallium backend for Apple’s GPU and pick up OpenGL and OpenCL support “for free”.
More sharing is possible. A key responsibility of the Gallium backend is to translate Gallium’s state objects into hardware packets, so we need a good representation of hardware packets. While packed bitfields can work, C’s bitfields have performance and safety (overflow) concerns. Hand-coded C structures lack pretty-printing needed for efficient debugging. Finally, while reverse-engineering, hand-coded C structures tend to accumulate random magic numbers in driver code, which is undesirable. These issues are not new; systems like Intel’s GenXML and Nouveau’s envytools solve them by allowing the hardware packets to be described as XML while all necessary C code is auto-generated. For Asahi, I’ve opted to use GenXML, providing a concise description of my reverse-engineering results and an ergonomic API for the driver.
Alyssa Rosenzweig has continued her work reverse engineering and understanding Apple's M1 GPU with the ultimate goal of writing open-source OpenGL and Vulkan support for the Apple M1 GPU on Linux.
Last month she began the early stages of a graphics compiler for the Apple M1 to begin tackling shaders with what information has been reverse engineered so far. Since then she has begun an early stage Gallium3D driver for the Apple M1 and beginning to focus on OpenGL 2.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 specifications.
It's in a state where at least the Gallium3D code can handle glxgears and some glmark2 scenes on the Apple M1. In fact today she opened a merge request as the initial push of this "AGX" driver. This AGX Gallium3D driver was originally based on the noop Gallium3D driver with some code derived from the work on the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali.
As part of recent and upcoming new CPU benchmarks on Phoronix and other Linux hardware review testing, April saw more new and updated test profiles for expanding more workloads tested.
April saw a number of new test profiles added for the Phoronix Test Suite and OpenBenchmarking.org usage whether you are reviewing computer components or for other benchmarking purposes. New test profiles added to the Phoronix Test Suite / OpenBenchmarking.org this past month included...
QEMU 6.0 is a huge release with a very long list of improvements for everyone using this powerful multi-platform full system emulator to run operating systems for Arm, PowerPC, RISC-V, s390, SPARC, x86 and other systems QEMU supports on Linux, Windows or macOS.
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The above list of new features in QEMU 6.0 barely scratches the surface, the full QEMU 6.0 changelog is a very long read.
The QEMU download page for Linux does not list any AppImage, Snap, .deb or .rpm packages or binaries of any kind, it simply lists instructions for installing it using the major Linux distributions repositories. All of them have some recently new QEMU version like 5.2, none have the latest 6.0 release. That leaves compiling from source as the only option if you really want QEMU 6.0 now. The source is a 102 MiB tarball that extracts to 724 MiB. Building it is, in theory, as easy as ./configure && make, but there are a lot of optional dependencies to work out. You will likely need to install a number of development packages and a number of ./configure flags like --enable-kvm (kind of important if you want to run x86-64 software on x86-64 without a huge performance penalty). You may be better off waiting until your distribution makes a QEMU 6.0 package unless you really want one of the new features right now. The actual compile will only take about 15 minutes on a Ryzen 1600X with -j 12, even thought the source tree is huge, so it is doable. Make sure to get all the dependencies in place and re-run ./configure so you don't end up with a crippled QEMU if you decide to go that route.
One could think that nowadays having a machine with software raid doing dual boot should be easy, but... my experience showed that it is not that easy.
Having a Windows machine do software raid is easy (I still don't understand why it doesn't really work like it should, but that is because I'm used to Linux software raid), and having software raid on Linux is also really easy. But doing so on a BIOS booted machine, on mbr disks (as Windows doesn't allow GPT on BIOS) is quite a pain.
Awk command is the most powerful scripting language in Linux that is developed with the purpose of text processing and transforming text in a way like producing formatted reports. It is relatable to grep and sed commands as it acts as filters. AWK command doesn’t have any specific definition to its name as it is named after the surname of its original developers Alfred Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan.
In this article we will cover 14 awk commands which might be useful. In this context, I have the following set of data in the sample.txt file in my system.
Docker community edition is open-source software available to install on almost all popular operating systems. We can easily install various container-based software to perform various common and server-side tasks. However, to use docker, we first have to install it and here we will show how to do that in Rocky Linux.
Apart from the Community edition, Docker is available for Enterprise as well. Althouth the community edition has all the functions required to operate containers and can be used on servers and on development and test machines. If you can do without enterprise support and some management functions, then you can go for the Open-source.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Gulp.js on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Gulp is a toolkit that helps developers in the automation of painful workflow during the development. Gulp lets us automate processes and run repetitive tasks with ease. It provides a feature of piping output from one task as an input to the next.
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 Gulp.js on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
Today we are looking at how to install Crocotile 3D on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
Fedora releases a new version in approximately every 6 months. Each now version is supported with updates for 13 months in total. The distribution is a good place to get the latest stable software and technologies consistently.
The latest stable version is currently Fedora 34, you can download it from the Fedora official website.
If you are a new Fedora user, you may be wondering about what to do after installation. The guide will help you through this part. No matter the supported Fedora version you use, you can apply everything on this list.
Fetch Master 6000 is an ASCII art "fetch" program similar to the popular Neofetch program. It offers a number of different ASCII art characters and a information box that is customizable. And the best part about it is that it is only 316 lines of code!
GNOME Internet Radio Locator 5.0.0 with BBC (United Kingdom) features English and Asian language translation, a new, improved map marker palette with 188 other radio stations from around the world and live audio streaming from BBC implemented through GStreamer.
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Linux is one of the driving factors behind today's ever-growing internet scene. In fact, over 70% of all websites are powered by Unix, with Linux taking 58% of that number. The sheer amount of features provided by Linux-based distros make them suitable for web, file, and DNS servers alongside enterprise infrastructures.
To help our readers choose the best Linux server distributions, we're outlining the top 10 options available to you.
Like clockwork, every April sees the release of a new version of Ubuntu and all the official variants. This release of Ubuntu, Hirsute Hippo, is noteworthy for its decision to not include the new desktop layout featured in GNOME 40. Instead, Ubuntu 21.04 continues to use version 3.38 of GNOME Shell. This means the desktop experience remains much the same as it has been in recent Ubuntu releases.
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Ubuntu 21.04 is a very solid release. Users of new releases of other GNOME-based distributions might be experiencing the new GNOME 40 interface, but Ubuntu 21.04's GNOME 3.38 desktop environment is functional and familiar. I do look forward to seeing how Ubuntu might tweak GNOME Shell 40 (or whatever the current post-40 GNOME version is at the time) in the future, but can find no fault with the decision to stick with 3.38 for now. The few issues I had with release are so minor they are barely worth repeating, but it would have been nice to see some non-hippo wallpapers.
Overall, I would recommend Ubuntu 21.04 to anyone who is okay with the short 9 month support window. If you are already a user of non-LTS Ubuntu releases, the upgrade from 20.10 to 21.04 is something you should feel comfortable doing as soon as possible. The new features, while not massive, are very nice quality of life improvements. Distro hoppers might be slightly more interested in distributions that feature GNOME 40, but I would still recommend they at least try out Ubuntu 21.04 to see what it has to offer.
We are pleased to announce the launch of Nitrux 1.4.0. This new version brings together the latest software updates, bug fixes, performance improvements, and ready-to-use hardware support.
Nitrux 1.4.0 is available for immediate download.
TeamViewer provides easy, fast and secure remote access and meeting solutions to Linux, Windows PCs, Apple PCs and various other platforms.
This project is a Qt/C++ based frontend to youtube-dl and it can be used to download any media file supported by youtube-dl.
VLC (VideoLAN Client) is a media player that can play MPEG1, MPEG2 and MPEG4 (aka DivX) files, DVDs, VCDs, SVCDs, from a satellite card, from a stream sent by VLS (VideoLAN Server), from another VLC, or from a Web server.
Evolution is the GNOME mailer, calendar, contact manager and communications tool. The tools which make up Evolution will be tightly integrated with one another and act as a seamless personal information-management tool.
Basilisk is a free and Open Source XUL-based web browser, featuring the well-known Firefox-style interface and operation. It is based on the Goanna layout and rendering engine (a fork of Gecko) and builds on the Unified XUL Platform (UXP), which in turn is a fork of the Mozilla code base without Servo or Rust.
First email from my new machine. I didn't have my desktop Debian machine for a long time and now I have one set up.
I am testing Racy and XenialPup running in containers, chasing down that corrupted-wallpaper problem -- that I thought was fixed, but isn't. But then discovered that locale is broken on those desktops, getting the message about only able to run applications in C locale.
First came the codename, then development opened, now Ubuntu 21.10 daily builds are available to download.
The installer images linked below arrive a little bit earlier than I was expecting (and a bit earlier than normal, based on previous releases). But progress comes as it does, and Ubuntu’s developers seem super keen to get started on this cycle.
Now, you’re reading this article on May 2021 — if you’re reading from the future than I have hopefully popped back and replaced this section. For now however, there’s not much to see in the daily builds. The first few weeks are spent getting imports synced, tooling updated, and any requisite foundations properly plumbed in.
All of the good stuff will follow.
Ubuntu 21.10 won't get a stable release until October of 2021. In fact, we know the exact date the Linux-based operating system should be made available -- October 14. In addition to that date, we also know what the distribution's codename will be -- Impish Indri.
Unfortunately, we only just entered the month of May, meaning Ubuntu 21.10 won't be available to download -- in stable form, at least -- for about five more months. According to the release schedule, the beta release of Impish Indri won't even be released until September at the earliest. Sigh. What is an Ubuntu enthusiast supposed to do?
As the recently released Kubuntu 21.04 with beautiful Plasma 5.21 makes its way into the world, inevitably other things come to their end.
Kubuntu 18.04 LTS was released in April 2018, and reached ‘End of Life’ for its 3 years of flavour support on 1st May 2021. All Kubuntu users should therefore switch to a newer supported release.
Running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS? Hopefully you’re not as it reached end of life on April 29,2021.
What does that mean? Bluntly: no more security updates, and no further Mozilla Firefox releases through the regular Ubuntu repos. If something critical breaks in the desktop release it will now stay broken.
Well, kinda.
See, companies unable (or simply unwilling) to ditch this version of Ubuntu can opt-in — i.e. pay — to receive extended support maintenance, known as ESM. Ubuntu 16.04 ESM is supported until 2024 with critical security patches. More detail on ESM can be found on the Ubuntu website.
If you or your organization is still using Ubuntu 16.04, it's time to evaluate your options.
EspinalLab ATMegaZero board was introduced last year with Raspberry Pi Zero form factor, the Arduino Leonardo compatible, 16 MHz Microchip ATmega32U4 microcontroller, and a connector for an optional OLED display.
The company is now back with an update following the same form factor with ATMegaZero ESP32-S2 board equipped with a more powerful ESP32-S2 single-core processor @ 240 MHz with WiFi connectivity, and most of the same features, including OLED display support, plus a micro USB OTG port and an RGD LED.
Some may remember I previously introduced the Atypica collective as a dedicated place where I could showcase some of my video production work (instead of having everything and the kitchen sink into my own website).
Launching Atypica was a long-standing project of mine that had been put on the back-burner because of some of my intensive CMO work in recent years (such as this, for instance). Awakening from the lucid dream allowed me to re-enter a long R&D phase where I could not only shave a ton of “infrastructure and productivity” yaks (that’s a story for another blog post, including the ridiculous tale of the months of work it took to fix my personal blog), but also realign my business objectives and pick up where I had left off “the last time”, hence the delayed announcement of Atypica’s website launch.
But Atypica, besides being the kind of initiative that works much better outside a pandemic, is merely one of my creative interests, and therefore part of my broader business orientations.
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When it comes to strategic work, I am very picky about who I surround myself with, so I am super excited to highlight the fact that—as can be seen in the Regento about/team page—I have partnered up with Halle Baksh, a good friend of mine whose business experience and wisdom I have great admiration for; our personalities also have great affinity. She is a wonderful human being (not a rogue A.I. like me) and a kindred spirit, and I look forward to continue working with her on making the world a slightly better place, one client’s business at a time.
This article will guide you through some of the apps that you can use as IDEs or code editors when working with Python. Top 5 best Python IDEs and code editors for Linux, Windows, & MacOS. Being a programmer requires writing code maybe 99% of the time, which is why it is really important to choose the best editor that suits your needs.
A programmer is not too different from that, except that, to write the code, they will need a code editor that has been specifically designed to recognize the code.
The White House is considering options for maximizing global production and supply of COVID-19 vaccines at the lowest cost, including backing a proposed waiver of intellectual property rights, but no decision has been made, press secretary Jen Psaki said on Tuesday.
"There are a lot of different ways to do that. Right now, that's one of the ways, but we have to assess what makes the most sense," Psaki said, adding that U.S. officials were studying whether it would be more effective to boost existing manufacturing of the vaccines in the United States.
U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai had not made a recommendation on the issue, and President Joe Biden had not made a decision, she said.
U.S. lawmakers and nonprofit groups are heaping pressure on the Biden administration to back the temporary patent waiver to help poor countries contain the pandemic as India and other countries battle a massive surge in cases.
About 6 months back I did a video on the spam bots that were taking over YouTube, since then that specific scam ended but that doesn't mean the bots are gone. In fact the spam bot problem on YouTube is worse than it's ever been.
The latest Bitcoin Core wallet for the Bitcoin network and BTC currency on it contains speedy trial activation code for a technology called Taproot that aims to make different kinds of Bitcoin transactions look mostly the same. Taproot requires a "soft fork" which will take place at block 709632 if enough Bitcoin miners adopt this or other versions signaling Taproot activation.
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Bitcoin Core is the de-facto Bitcoin reference implementation with roots going back to the original Bitcoin wallet by "Satoshi Nakamoto". It is an ideal Bitcoin wallet for everyone who wants to wait two weeks for a digital currency wallet to sync so they can pay $25-60 in "network fees" to send digital BTC currency that will arrive after one to two hours, or 6 "blocks".
The big highlight in Bitcoin Core 0.21.1 is the "Speedy Trial" activation of a technology called Taproot that will lead to a "soft fork" of the Bitcoin network at block 709632 if a majority of the "decentralized" Bitcoin miners located in a single province in China adopt the new version.
Today, Netflix offers dubbing in 34 languages and subtitles in several more. [This beats the translation apparatus of the EU itself, which works to make contents available in the Union’s 24 official languages.] It means that a police drama written in Luxembourgish, (a form of Moselle Franconian language part of the wider group of West Germanic languages), is now available via streaming in multiple languages.
All of this gives proof paid to the observation made by the Italian author, Umberto Eco, that the language of Europe is translation.
Why is this important? Jean Monnet, perhaps the father of the now- EU, was reported to have one observed: “I were to do it over again from scratch, I would start with culture.”
Economic integration is certainly crucial but, as has been observed with increasing intensity, cultural integration may be equally important. Being dispersed from the Tower of Babel and left to our distinct national cultural and linguistic devices is hardly a formula for integration, no matter how glorious the resultant cultural outputs.
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First, streaming companies are required that 30% of their viewing catalog derives from the EU, and not to then simply bury these contents in a “digital cupboard”, but to genuinely promote them.
A former Netflix Inc. executive was convicted of taking kickbacks from vendors in exchange for approving millions of dollars in contracts for products and services, federal prosecutors said.
A jury on Friday found Michael Kail, a former vice president of information technology operations, guilty of wire and mail fraud and money laundering after a two-week trial, according to a statement issued by the U.S. Attorney’s office in San Francisco.
“Bribery undermines fair competition and innovation in any business arena, and particularly Silicon Valley’s highly competitive environment of cutting-edge innovation,” Acting U.S. Attorney Stephanie M. Hinds said in the statement.
Kail used his influence at the company to rig its contracts with technology vendors “to unlock a stream of cash and stock kickbacks to himself,” Hinds said.
Kail’s lawyer, Julia Mezhinsky Jayne, said in a statement that he will appeal the “inexplicable” verdict, which she said is unsupported by evidence and driven by Netflix.
On Monday, Apple faces one of its most serious legal threats in recent years: A trial that threatens to upend its iron control over its app store, which brings in billions of dollars each year while feeding more than 1.6 billion iPhones, iPads, and other devices.
The federal court case is being brought by Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite. Epic wants to topple the so-called “walled garden” of the app store, which Apple started building 13 years ago as part of a strategy masterminded by co-founder Steve Jobs.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has started to unleash a new industrial revolution. It represents a significant technology advantage which already impacts today’s products and services and will drive tomorrow’s industries. Its key importance to the technological progress of future societies is beyond doubt and is reflected by a boom in patent applications on AI technology since 2013 in various industry sectors.
From a legal perspective, the patent system is the core mechanism to foster innovation. The prospect of a patent is supposed to induce innovative behaviour. However, the founders of intellectual property (IP) law never considered that a machine could one day autonomously come up with a new, useful, and non-obvious idea. Historically, the patent system has been built on a paradigm of human inventorship.
Just recently, various courts and patent offices confirmed that a machine cannot be the inventor of a patentable invention. The decisions concerned a machine called DABUS. Allegedly, this AI system had autonomously generated two inventions: an innovative food container as well as useful devices and methods for attracting enhanced attention. The patent offices refused the patent applications on formal grounds since only a human can be designated as inventor by the applicant.
Does a tree falling in a forest make a sound? The answer to this epistemological cliché (and whether or not you care) depends on your philosophical leanings. Patent law has its own clear answer to the question. In UK patent law, the mere potential for prior public use to have been observed can deprive an invention of novelty. This principle can be a problem for inventors seeking to test prototypes of their inventions, and raises the question of how large, mechanical inventions can be tested without creating the potential (however small) for the invention to have been observed. The recent case of Claydon v Mzuri ([2021] EWHC 1007 (IPEC)) is a particularly harsh example of the application of the prior use case law. The patent was deprived of novelty in view of the inventor's prior use of a prototype of the invention (a seed drill) in a secluded field on his own land.
Legal Background: Expandable hose pipes and the potentiality of disclosure
A general principle of UK patent case law is that disclosures in a publicly visible place are prior art even if no one was there to observe the disclosure. The classic example of such a disclosure is the unread PhD thesis languishing in a publicly accessible library. In Emson v Hozelock, Mr Justice Nugee (as then was), considered whether the development of a new garden hose by an inventor in his garden should be considered prior public use (IPKat: Mr Justice Nugee and the Superhose: The potentiality of disclosure).
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To this Kat, the outcome of this decision raises the question of the suitability of the potentiality of disclosure test for prior use. The patentee was deprived of their patent because the inventor had tested, unobserved, a prototype of his invention on his own land, just because there had been the potential (how every small) for a skilled person to look through a gap in the hedge from an overgrown and unmarked footpath. This does not feel like a wholly fair outcome. Indeed, despite his final decision, Hacon HHJ himself was obviously sympathetic to the plight of the patentee: "Mr Claydon had to test his prototype, nobody saw any of the testing and I entirely understand why he believed that his invention was not publicly disclosed" (para. 102) [Merpel: Indeed, what was the inventor expected to do, test his seed drill indoors?]
The concept of "intentionality" in prior use was arguably introduced in Emson v Hozelock as a way to avoid outcomes of patent invalidity based on prior use that would seem obviously unfair to the layman (IPKat). However, the decision in Claydon v Mzuri now reveals the limitations of the intentionality argument, and particularly the difficulty of building a case around the intentions that inventors may or may not have had many years ago. Hacon HHJ noted that he found "it hard to believe that nearly 20 years later Mr Claydon could accurately say with any certainty what he would have done" at the time the invention was conceived and tested (para. 92).
At its core, this is an employer-inventor dispute in the area of gene sequencing technology. Saxonov & Hindson co-founded company QuantLife that was bought out by Bio-Rad. The pair then became Bio-Rad employees. At both companies they signed agreements to transfer invention rights to Bio-Rad. In April 2012 the pair left Bio-Rad; in July 2012 formed 10X; and began filing new patent applications in August 2012. These applications eventually issued as patents and include the patents-in-suit: US Patent Nos. 9,689,024, 9,695,468, and 9,856,530.
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The Federal Circuit disagreed. The contract required assignment of “intellectual property” that was “conceive[d], develop[ed], or create[d]” during Bio-Rad employment. But for a patent, “intellectual property does not exist until at least conception,” and the conception date of each invention was after the inventors left Bio-Rad to found 10X. The ITC correctly held that “the assignment provisions do not apply to a signatory’s ideas … solely because the ideas ended up contributing to a postemployment patentable invention.”
The agreements are clear that they are limited to the term of employment: Each promised to assign anything conceived, developed, or reduced-to-practice “during the period of my employment.”
Senior counsel at BMS, HPE, Volvo, Veritas and PAX Labs say IP attorneys should endeavour to become jacks of all trades to help them climb the corporate ladder
Ever wondered what annoys an IP judge? Ever considered how they approach a case? Or perhaps you’re just curious about how they use their spare time? To find the answers to these questions and more, look no further than our special report – which comprises interviews with leading judges across the world’s major IP jurisdictions.
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In mid-2019, we embarked on a mission to interview leading judges worldwide – and this report is the culmination of our efforts to date. Since we published the interview with Mr Justice Henry Carr, he sadly passed away. Mr Justice Richard Arnold was promoted to Lord Justice of Appeal after his interview was published, and our conversation with Justice Peter Huber, following which we broke a major story about the Unified Patent Court, was framed mainly on one case.
This is the conclusion of a joint report released Tuesday from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA).
“Around half the emissions reductions to get to net zero by 2050 may need to come from technologies that are not yet on the market,” said IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol in a press release.
The report “Patents and the energy transition: global trends in clean energy technology innovation” looks at trends in low-carbon energy innovation between 2000 and 2019 in terms of international patent families (IPFs). An IPF represents a unique, high-value invention for which a patent application was filed at two or more patent offices around the globe. Patent applications can be considered an early indicator of future technological trends as they are filed months or years before the products go to market.
On its part, the EC’s IP action plan has identified the fragmentation of the EU’s IP system as one of the main challenges in the upgrading of the EU’s IP framework. For this reason, the EC fully supports the unitary patent and the system of centralised litigation before the new Unified Patent Court (assuming this eventually comes into effect). The EC has high hopes for the unitary patent system, considered ‘a key tool for the EU’s industrial recovery, especially for the renewable energy, electronics, aerospace and defence, and mobility ecosystems.’
In their forthcoming article, Professors Dmitry Karshtedt, Mark A. Lemley & Sean B. Seymore argue that the Federal Circuit has improperly and unduly limited the ability of chemical and biotech innovators to obtain genus claims — i.e., claims that cover “not just one specific chemical but a group of related chemicals.” The Death of the Genus Claim, 35 Harv. J.L. & Tech. (forthcoming 2021). Now, the trio (along with others) have taken their prior work and converted it to an amicus brief supporting en banc review in the pending case of Amgen Inc. v. Sanofi, Docket No. 20-01074 (Fed. Cir. Oct 24, 2019). Amgen v. Sanofi – Lemley Brief.
The focus of the case is on “genus claims” where the genus is defined by functional limitations. Here, the patent covers antibodies that bind to a certain protein-molecule [PCSK9] in a certain way [to block LDRL binding]. However, the claim does not affirmatively spell-out the structure of the claim.
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Functional Claim Language: The decision briefing focuses on chemistry and biotech, but the truth is that functional claim limitations are most often found in claims directed to mechanical, electronic, and software fields. These functional claims – to the extent they encompass thousands (or potentially millions) of embodiments – are equally susceptible to the transformed approach. For many years, these two arenas have been treated differently for enablement purposes — with courts often classifying innovations as either within the predictable or unpredictable arts. However, Amgen also shows substantial crossover. In other words, Amgen is generally another attack on claims defined by functional limits.
In the United States, national policy regarding standardization, and especially patents covering standardized products (standards-essential patents, or SEPs) is in a state of disarray. No single U.S. federal agency has authority over national policy toward standardization, nor does a coherent national standardization policy exist. Rather, policies are created ad hoc by a range of authorities, often in response to industry lobbying and in areas outside the agencies’ core competencies. The result has been a piecemeal array of conflicting and flip-flopping policies that confound private industry, harm consumers, and diminish the role of the United States as a model for the rest of the world. Rationalizing and centralizing this patchwork of policy authority would significantly improve consistency, predictability, and stability in this area of national importance.
This draft chapter is part of a larger research project exploring the question of patent quality from a human agency perspective. This chapter explores the changing relationship between agency, and specifically, 'professionalized' agency, and patent quality.
The Federal Court recently dismissed Merck’s application for judicial review of Health Canada’s refusal to add Canadian Patent No. 2,830,806 (806 Patent) to the Patent Register, holding that Health Canada’s decision was justified, intelligible and transparent, and therefore reasonable: Merck Canada Inc v Canada (Health), 2021 FC 345. The 806 Patent issued on May 12, 2020, and contains claims directed to a formulation of Merck’s KEYTRUDA, a biologic drug containing pembrolizumab, approved for the treatment of certain cancers. Patent lists for the 806 Patent were submitted on June 12, 2020, but not until after the close of business. Pursuant to its electronic filing policies, Health Canada considered the patent lists filed on the next business day, June 15, 2020. This was outside the 30-day time period prescribed in subsection 4(6) of the Patented Medicines (Notice of Compliance) Regulations (PMNOC Regulations) and Health Canada deemed the patent lists ineligible for inclusion on the Patent Register.
Apple, AT&T, Bloomberg, Equinix, Google and Verizon were all named as defendants in a patent infringement lawsuit that stems from a separate case involving computer networking specialist Juniper Networks.
In its suit filed with the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California on Tuesday, Core Optical Technologies alleges Apple, AT&T, Bloomberg, Equinix, Google and Verizon used accused infringed intellectual property by purchasing and utilizing products from Juniper.
Core Optical in 2019 filed suit against Juniper for alleged infringement of U.S. Patent No. 6,782,211. That case has since been transferred to the Northern District of California.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank has had a decimating influence on patents and patent applications. Its long shadow looms over every stage of a patent’s life cycle — from prosecution to litigation and the administrative post-grant process at the patent office. In their article, Professor Jay Kesan and Dr. Runhua Wang offer a penetrating look at Alice’s influence on software, business methods and bioinformatics, all key technologies powering our modern economy. This Response sets out the relevant law on patent eligibility, contextualizes the Authors’ key findings on bioinformatics applications against that legal framework, and considers whether Congress, the courts, and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) can be agents of change to alleviate Alice’s baleful influence on patent law.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has granted Apple a patent for its method of capturing 3D face biometrics with a hybrid lighting system. The patent for Face ID’s ‘Hybrid mode illumination for facial recognition authentication’ comes after another one the USPTO granted last week, which protects Face ID’s features relying on multi-component vision biometric systems.
A point of criticism is that the GC's representation of Hasbro's statement seems somewhat unfair. By stressing repeatedly "that the applicant admitted, and even submitted, that one of the advantages which justified the filing of the contested mark was not having to furnish proof of genuine use" [e.g. at 89], one gets the impression that Hasbro sought not to have to furnish such proof altogether. It seems to this Kat that's not quite what Hasbro's witness meant to say.
Then again, it could be that the GC is effectively telling us that any repeat filing for identical goods will prima facie constitute bad faith. The statement of Hasbro's witness effectively decided the case and in hindsight, Hasbro is likely to regret its admission that it wanted to avoid having to prove genuine use every time it files an opposition. It will, however, be rare for such statements to be submitted in proceedings; after this decision, no sane trade mark proprietor would admit anything coming close.
Perhaps, then, the GC wanted to extend the reach of its decision beyond the facts of this particular case by paraphrasing Hasbro's admission in a more general way, applicable to a broader category of future decisions. The observation that in this particular case, the filing strategy even "called to mind" abuse of law lends support to this interpretation: apparently, the GC felt that this case went beyond mere inconsistency with the objectives pursued by the EUTMR, a classification now perhaps applied to "regular" repeat filings without specific commercial justifications.
After all, "not having to furnish proof of genuine use" is a direct result of any repeat filing, whether there is an admission on the file or not. And no obvious examples come to mind where a repeat filing would be based on an appropriate commercial logic. If this Kat's guess is true, the GC's decision may yet achieve infamy akin to the board game whose name it carries.
Monopoly may not be quite a favourite in the board gaming community, but the eponymous trade mark decision of last week by the General Court (GC) is sure to become a darling of trade mark professionals. The GC affirmed an important 2019 ruling by the European Union Intellectual Property Office's (EUIPO) Second Board of Appeal (BoA), finding that repeat filings of earlier trade marks may, in specific circumstances, constitute bad faith [BoA decision here, Katpost here; GC decision here, case no T-663/19].
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A point of criticism is that the GC's representation of Hasbro's statement seems somewhat unfair. By stressing repeatedly "that the applicant admitted, and even submitted, that one of the advantages which justified the filing of the contested mark was not having to furnish proof of genuine use" [e.g. at 89], one gets the impression that Hasbro sought not to have to furnish such proof altogether. It seems to this Kat that's not quite what Hasbro's witness meant to say.
Then again, it could be that the GC is effectively telling us that any repeat filing for identical goods will prima facie constitute bad faith. The statement of Hasbro's witness effectively decided the case and in hindsight, Hasbro is likely to regret its admission that it wanted to avoid having to prove genuine use every time it files an opposition. It will, however, be rare for such statements to be submitted in proceedings; after this decision, no sane trade mark proprietor would admit anything coming close.
Perhaps, then, the GC wanted to extend the reach of its decision beyond the facts of this particular case by paraphrasing Hasbro's admission in a more general way, applicable to a broader category of future decisions. The observation that in this particular case, the filing strategy even "called to mind" abuse of law lends support to this interpretation: apparently, the GC felt that this case went beyond mere inconsistency with the objectives pursued by the EUTMR, a classification now perhaps applied to "regular" repeat filings without specific commercial justifications.
After all, "not having to furnish proof of genuine use" is a direct result of any repeat filing, whether there is an admission on the file or not. And no obvious examples come to mind where a repeat filing would be based on an appropriate commercial logic. If this Kat's guess is true, the GC's decision may yet achieve infamy akin to the board game whose name it carries.
A quiet conflict that has pitted two pending trademark applications against one another over the past year has resulted in a formal scuffle between Marc Jacobs and The Ohio State University (“OSU”). On the heels of the two parties filing respective trademark applications to register the word “THE” for use on apparel, OSU has initiated an opposition proceeding in an attempt to block the application that Marc Jacobs filed in May 2019 for “THE” for use on handbags and clothing, among other related goods. The Fashion Law reported on the proceedings.
Early this year, counsel for Kanye West’s Yeezy LLC filed a trademark application for registration for a stylized sun rays graphic. Consisting of “eight dotted lines, each comprising three totally shaded circles, with a total of 24 circles, arranged at equal angles as rays from a sun,” Yeezy LLC’s asserts in its application that it intends to use the mark in connection with everything from clothing and retail store services, and musical sound recordings and streaming to hotel services and the construction of “non-metal modular homes,” among other things. Now, almost four months after Yeezy lodged that application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, Walmart has stepped in, arguing that the Yeezy graphic looks a bit too much like one that it has been using on similar goods/services for over a decade.
According to the notice of opposition that it filed with the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board on April 21 (as trademark attorney Erik Pelton pointed out) , Walmart claims that “it will be damaged by registration of [Yeezy LLC’s] mark,” since it has been using a lookalike mark – “a design of six rays symmetrically centered around a circle” – since at least 2007. As a result of its consistent use of the mark, which “can be found prominently featured on the exterior and interior signage of [its] more than 5,000 retail outlets, through the ecommerce platform www.walmart.com, which has the second largest e-commerce market share in the U.S., and throughout [its] nationwide television commercials, including commercials aired during the Super Bowl,” Walmart claims that its mark “has become well known and famous as a distinctive indicator of the origin of [its] goods and services and a symbol of [its] goodwill” as a company.
A quiet conflict that has pitted two pending trademark applications against one another over the past year has resulted in a formal scuffle between Marc Jacobs and The Ohio State University (“OSU”). On the heels of the two parties filing respective trademark applications to register the word “THE” for use on apparel, OSU has initiated an opposition proceeding in an attempt to block the application that Marc Jacobs filed in May 2019 for “THE” for use on handbags and clothing, among other related goods. In its recently-filed opposition filing, the Columbus, Ohio-based college argues that it has consistently used “THE” as a trademark on athletic merch since at least as early as 2005, more than a decade before Marc Jacobs began to use the mark in connection with its offerings.
According to the opposition that it filed early this month, as first pointed out by trademark attorney Josh Gerben, OSU claims that the school changed its name in 1878, and as “legend [has] it, the use of ‘The’ (as opposed to the addition of nothing – i.e., Ohio State University or ‘an’ Ohio State University) was to make clear that [the school] was earmarked to be the leading educational institution in Ohio, both in size and financial support from the legislature.” Its “use and emphasis on the word ‘THE’” since then has been “a deliberate, integral, and important element of [OSU’s] identity and history,” the school argues, noting that it “has been continuously and consistently using ‘THE’ as a trademark and in manners analogous to trademark use in connection with its athletic program since at least as early as the 1980’s,” thereby, giving rise to “demand for apparel bearing the trademark ‘THE’” among “students, alumni, and fans of Ohio State and its athletic programs.”
The holding in Google v. Oracle, No. 18-956, slip op. (U.S. Apr. 5, 2021), worth a cool $9 billion, is that Google and others are free, under the fair use doctrine of copyright law, to copy Oracle/Sun’s Java API (application program interface) code. They’re also free, under copyright law, to write their own implementing code or to have others do so. Taking these two points together, Google escaped liability for infringement of Oracle’s copyrighted Java code. They can have Java programmers write apps to run on the Android operating system. And they can thumb their noses at Oracle.
Let’s unpack the term API for those of us who are not steeped in interface code. An “app” is like a customer walking into a restaurant. The computer on which the app runs is like the kitchen. An API is like the waiter that goes back and forth between the customer and the kitchen. The Supreme Court has just held in Oracle that the waiter has to serve every customer that enters the restaurant.
Oracle’s predecessor Sun wrote the Java code and made some effort to protect the APIs with patents and copyrights. Google did not want to pay Oracle/Sun for a license to use the Java code in its Android systems. So Google wrote its own code (or at least 99% of it), and it incorporated, that is, copied, the APIs. The Oracle/Sun patents fell by the wayside: A jury found that Google did not infringe Oracle’s patent claims. And now the Supreme Court has held that under copyright law, it was okay for Google to use the APIs without any obligation to Oracle, because (1) Google’s use was held to be new and transformative, (2) the APIs comprised less than 1% of Java’s total code, and (3) the APIs were held to be functional, thus making it “fair use” for Google to copy and use the same.
