It is always with a sense of wonderment, befuddlement, and disbelief that the company from Cupertino pushes its tablet and desktop operating systems closer and closer together, especially as it has steadfastly refused to allow a touchscreen on Macs.
But the interaction style from the latter half of the last century has been good enough for Apple, and that's that for the world's largest computer firm.
While I still concur the desktop-style interface is paramount among the choices on offer, it isn't necessarily the best in circumstances when an app, which has been built for a touch interface, is lazily ported onto your desktop.
Seeing how the foundation of Chrome Unboxed is built very much on Chrome OS and cloud computing, we are huge fans of the open web and ever-evolving tools that come with the territory. That said, there is one particular area that Chrome OS is still lacking and I’m afraid that we are still a few years out from a web-based solution. Yes, I am talking about video editing. There is an increasing number of really good web-based video creation tools out there and for a lot of users, they do everything needed to create quality content for the classroom, marketing materials, or what have you. For serious content creators and studios, however, those tools simply won’t cut it. Thankfully, Chrome OS has matured extensively over the past ten years, and times, they are a-changing.
The perfect offline distro, and your feedback about WSLg, Plasma issues, our terrible artwork, some app suggestions, and more.
This week’s episode of Destination Linux, we’ve got a special guest joining us for an interview. Massimo Stella of Kdenlive will be joining us to talk about this great open source video editor. In our Community Feedback, Adobe’s Flash is Dead, which other technologies should just go away? Then we take a look at the Linux Kernel 5.13 release and discuss some major ARM news going on. Plus we’ve also got our famous tips, tricks and software picks. All of this and so much more this week on Destination Linux. So whether you’re brand new to Linux and open source or a guru of sudo. This is the podcast for you.
This time, we have the releae of elementary OS 6 public beta, a new mechanical keyboard from System76, Audacity getting some big backlash after annlouncing the introduction of telemetry, and some new information about the JingPad A1 , linux powered tablet
Collabora has been investing into Perfetto to enable driver authors and users to get deep insights into driver internals and GPU performance which were not previously visible. This post shows how we applied this work and other peformance analysis tools to study a number of workloads on the virtualized VirGL implementation, and used this insight to improve performance by up to 6.2%.
Back in August 2019, I wrote about running games in a virtual machine by using virglrenderer. Now, let's look at how the code can be tweaked to squeeze out the last bit of performance.
Virglrenderer that is part of the open-source Linux effort to provide accelerated OpenGL to guest virtual machines has been enjoying some new micro-optimizations.
Gert Wollny outlined how making use of Perfetto for run-time profiling of Virglrenderer they were able to gain new insight into areas of Virglrenderer to focus on for micro-optimizations.
The open-source Panfrost graphics driver stack that is now seeing support backed by Arm is going to see Mediatek MT8183 support with the upcoming Linux 5.14 kernel cycle this summer.
The Mediatek MT8183 SoC will work with the Panfrost DRM kernel driver come Linux 5.14. This Mediatek SoC is prominent for being used by HP, Acer, and Lenovo Chromebooks. The Mediatek MT8183 was announced at the end of 2019 with featuring eight Cortex-A73 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores while using Arm Mali G72 MP3 graphics.
Creating disk partitions enables you to split your hard drive into multiple sections that act independently.
In Linux, users must structure storage devices (USB and hard drives) before using them. Partitioning is also useful when you are installing multiple operating systems on a single machine.
These are some of those critical programs for your computer. Without these, your computer will not know where to find any of the partitions or drives on the computer. Goof this up and you can be dead in the water. Never make any changes without a good backup copy.
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Unixcop - Linux and Unix Howtos, Tutorials, Guides, News, Devops, Cloud, Monitoing, Tips and Tricks etc ....
cURL (client URL) is one of the most used commands to automate the process of sending and receiving data to or from a server.
The curl command supports many protocols such as – HTTP, HTTPS, FTP, SFTP, TELNET, etc. It is a cross-platform tool available in Windows, Unix, and macOS.
cURL has a very broad usage – a quick way to see how broad of a usage, you can run curl -h in your terminal and see all of the options it offers.
Figma is a popular graphic design tool that allows wireframing, creating high-fidelity user interface designs, prototyping, and more in a real-time collaborative environment. One of the most loved features of Figma is its ability to run inside a browser, which makes it platform-independent.
However, you might prefer the native application feel over a browser-based one. Figma does not have any official Linux client at the moment, but you can still install it on Linux as an application with an open-source client. Let's find out how.
How you deploy models into production is what separates an academic exercise from an investment in ML that is value-generating for your business. At scale, this becomes painfully complex. This guide walks you through industry best practices and methods, concluding with a practical tool, KFServing, that tackles model serving at scale.
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The most direct way to use your model within an application is called model embedding. In this method, you simply embed the file that contains your model within your application code, and the application will directly access it.
This has a few advantages, as the simpler infrastructure and direct access provide maximum performance during inference and, being embedded within the application, it allows for offline use. However, this is not a scalable method and generally regarded today as not a great practice.
When we view the contents of any directory in Ubuntu, it is displayed based on file and folders’ names. However, sometimes we may need to sort the files in a specific order to get a better overview and locate files easier. For instance, it may be helpful if we want to view which files were accessed last time.
In this article, I will explain how to sort files in a Ubuntu system using the Nautilus File Manager (the GUI) and the ls command (the command line).
We have used Ubuntu 20.04 for running the commands and procedures mentioned in this article.
In an ever-connected world, network security is increasingly becoming one of the areas where organizations invest a great deal of time and resources. This is because a company’s network is the backbone of any IT infrastructure and connects all the servers and network devices. If the network is breached, the organization will pretty much be at the mercy of the hackers. Crucial data can be exfiltrated and business-centric services and applications can be brought down.
In this article, we are going to discuss the syslog protocol. We’ll also learn about the logger command, which is a shell command and acts as an interface for the syslog module. The logger command makes entries in the system log. In this section, we are also going to create an alarm using a script.
The big new release of Mass Effect Legendary Edition from BioWare and EA is only supported for Windows on PC, but with Proton GE you should now be able to play it on Linux. Should being the keyword, as Proton can be a little fiddly at times.
If you're not clear on what Proton and Steam Play are, be sure to check out our constantly updated dedicated page. It's a special compatibility layer for running Windows games and apps from Steam on Linux. Proton GE is the community-made version which has a number of extras.
If you're new to Linux, you've probably never heard of a tiling window manager. If you're new to Linux, and you mistakenly try out a tiling window manager, you're in for a surprise. Tiling window managers have been around for a while and for the uninitiated they can be a real challenge.
The idea behind the tiling window manager is to efficiently and automatically organize your desktop for you. Most tiling window managers do this quite well—you open one app and it places it, automatically maximized, on your screen. Open another app and it splits the screen with the first app. Continue opening apps and you'll find each app continues to split.
The first maintenance release of the 21.04 series is out with many bug fixes and improvements.
The video stabilization function (Vidstab) for clips in the project bin will be working again with upcoming version 21.04.2.
So what can I say? Kubuntu 21.04 Hirsute Hippo is a meh distro. There isn't any glamor or novelty, or in fact, any reason for it to exist. Interim releases don't make sense, with any distro family out there. It'd be so much better if we had one release every 18-24 months, but then get a nice, polished product. All in all, it's nothing spectacular. There were bugs, there were regressions, there were glitches. Compare to the previous release, and then scratch your head.
If you like Plasma, then Kubuntu does a good job, but you should stay with an LTS. I can't say there is anything majorly useful or exciting here, and I feel totally dejected by the random scattershot of new problems. But until distros invest huge effort and resources in proper QA, nothing will change. So there we go. I went through the motions, I ticked a box, and I don't feel any wiser or happier because of it. Until the next time.
Today the T2 System Development Environment Linux 21.5 was released with an even larger amount of supported, 18 pre- and cross-compiled set of architectures ever: alpha, arm, arm64, hppa, ia64, m68k, mips64, mipsel, ppc, ppc64-32, ppc64le, riscv, riscv64, s390x, sparc64, superh, x86, and x86-64.
Major performance improemvnts were implemented, including: not yet upstream x86 concurrent TLB flushing, faster in-kernel zstd update as well as smarter (profile guided Os vs O3) whole system optimizations!
The 21.5 release received updates across the board, while a major point of work was the GCC 11 update as well as re-basing and fixing upstream regressions for the Sony PS3 support as well as various small improvements, including an up to 15 seconds faster system shutdown when using sysvinit.
All 18 official ISO images are fully cross compiled! Over 224 Subversion revisions, of which many are now AI updated by our nightly package bot we named “Data” ;-)
Usually most packages are up-to-date, including Linux 5.12.4, GCC 11.0, LLVM/Clang 12, as well as the latest version of X.org, Mesa, Firefox, Rust, KDE and GNOME 40!
More information, source and binary downloads are open source and free at:
https://t2sde.org
Recently the development can also be followed live on YouTube at:
https://youtube.com/morerenerebe
There were 224 changesets with 251 lines of commit messages. Approximately 132 packages got updates, 25 issues fixed, 132 packages or features added and 10 removed. Multiple improvements have been committed.
Bodhi Linux is an Ubuntu-based desktop distribution valuing minimalism and user choice. In accordance with that philosophy, the Standard Bodhi Linux install includes only a tiny number of pre-installed apps and the freedom to install whatever additional apps you wish.
To further add to user freedom, the desktop environment for Bodhi Linux, Moksha, makes as many configuration options available to the user as possible. It's also designed to be lightweight and fast, making it one of the best distros for older devices.
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Are you running a previous version of Bodhi and wondering if you should upgrade? Bodhi 6 is stable and offers several improvements. While remaining on 5.1 won't hurt you for the time being (Ubuntu 18.04 official support lasts until April 2023), you'd at least benefit from an updated package base for the apps you use.
If you're new to Bodhi, the distro is definitely unique among the host of options out there. Its beautiful themes and speedy engine make it an ideal option for those who value aesthetics, efficiency, and simplicity. The Standard install, in fact, is one of several great, lean options for running Linux on PCs with minimal disk space.
GeckoLinux is pleased to announce updates to its complete lineup of ROLLING spins, which are proudly built with unmodified openSUSE Tumbleweed and Packman packages from those projects' own repositories.
GeckoLinux ROLLING 999.210517 editions are now available for download built with unmodified openSUSE Tumbleweed and Packman packages, and they come with a major change for those who want to install this desktop-oriented distribution, namely using Btrfs as default filesystem for the guided installation.
While Btrfs is now the default file system for new installations, your existing GeckoLinux ROLLING installation won’t be affected the next time you update your system. Also, if you want to install GeckoLinux with another file system, you can select from the various supported filesystem via the custom partitioning option.
Both openSUSE Leap 15.3 and SUSE Enterprise Linux 15 SP3 are already in the oven and almost ready to be tasted. But although they smell delicious, the openSUSE volunteers and the great SUSE QA team never give up in challenging our beloved distributions to find the corner cases that need more polishing. Since we want to make sure each possible problem have a solution or a documented workaround at the release date, the YaST Team invested quite some time during the last sprint investigating and solving some problems related to AutoYaST, system migration, registration and other tricky areas.
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One of the many features offered by AutoYaST is the possibility of specifying a so-called ask-list, which lets the user decide the values of some parts of the AutoYaST profile during the installation. That allows to fine-tune the level of flexibility and interactivity, with a process that is highly automated but still customizable on the fly. During this sprint we basically rewrote the whole feature to make it more robust and powerful, while still being fully backwards-compatible. See more details in the corresponding pull request including technical details, before-and-after screenshots and a link to the official documentation that explains how to use this reworked feature.
Fedora 35 is looking to replace the unmaintained SDL 1.2 packages with using the sdl12-compat compatibility layer for better handling of vintage Linux games by this upcoming distribution release.
The hope is to replace the existing SDL 1.2 packages with sdl12-compat, which is basically the SDL 1.2 interfaces mapped over SDL 2.0. This SDL 1.2 compatibility layer is using SDL 2.0 "behind the scenes" and continues to see new commits unlike the unmaintained original SDL 1.2.
One way to meet this need is to enable companies to consume public cloud services anywhere else in their IT infrastructure in a software deployment model, according to Jason McGee (pictured, right), IBM fellow, vice president and chief technology officer of the IBM cloud platform at IBM.
“So, recently we launched this thing called IBM Cloud Satellite,” he said. “[It is] how we can actually extend the public cloud experience back into the data center, out to the edge, and allow people to kind of mix both location flexibility with public cloud consumption,” he said.
McGee and Octavian Tanase (pictured, left), senior vice president of engineering at NetApp Inc., spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during IBM Think. They discussed the new demands of companies on the hybrid cloud, the main features of the IBM Cloud Satellite, and how the data storage provider NetApp complements this solution. (* Disclosure below.)
Valve Corporation runs Steam—the world's largest Windows, Mac, and Debian game store. Two new private antitrust class-actions allege that Valve, through Steam, controls and illegally maintains a monopoly in the PC game platform market.
Say you’re a microbiologist looking at the effectiveness of a promising compound on certain muscle cells. You’re working in R, writing in RStudio on an Ubuntu machine, and your data are such and such collected during an in vitro observation. While you would naturally declare all this when you publish, there’s no guarantee anyone has an Ubuntu laptop with a working RStudio setup around, so even if you provide all the code, it might be for nothing.
Firefly has launched a “ROC-RK3566-PC” SBC with a Rockchip RK3566 and 2GB ($89) or 4GB ($119) RAM plus 32GB eMMC, GbE, WiFi/BT, MIPI, HDMI, M.2, and 3x USB. Specs have also been posted for a RK3568-based model.
T-Chip Technology’s Firefly community project is continuing its transition to Rockchip’s quad-core, Cortex-A55 based RK3566 and RK3568 by launching its first monolithic SBC based on the RK3566. The company also posted specs for a more feature-rich model that taps the similarly NPU-equipped RK3568.
The $89 and up ROC-RK3566-PC and upcoming ROC-RK3568-PC boards follow Firefly’s RK3568-powered Core-3568J module and sandwich-style dev kit, as well as its Station P2 mini-PC, both of which feature the RK3568. The Station P2 appears to be based on the ROC-RK3568-PC, which we cover farther below.
Rockchip’s RK3566 processor is a new 1.8 GHz ARM Cortex-A55 chip with Mali-G52 graphics and support for features including playback of 4K/60Hz video in H.264, H.265, and VP9 codecs.
The first single-board computers (SBCs) powered by the chip are expected to ship in the coming months. Recently Pine64 revealed that a Raspberry Pi-sized SBC called the Quartz64 Model B was on the way. Now Firefly has introduced a similarly-sized RK3566 SBC called the ROC-RK3566-PC.
If you’ve been using Arduino IDE for a while, you would eventually need to extend its capabilities to connect with sensors, displays, Arduino shields, non-Arduino boards, and any other modules. After all, there is a limit to the number of built-in sketches you can use from the downloaded Arduino software.
Recently I saw a pull request for the kitty terminal that kind of annoyed me, not because of the content but because of the complete of any social awareness and etiquette from the creator and the maintainer of the project. Please use this as an example of how not to act.
Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted.
Google announced that 1,292 students were selected from 69 countries. Some 4,795 students submitted 6,991 applications from 103 countries in total.
At the start of May, we launched the Month of LibreOffice, encouraging all users to get involved and help to make the software even better. Everyone who contributes – be it to documentation, translations, bug report testing and other areas – can claim a cool sticker pack, and has a chance to win extra merch too...
Microsoft Office is pricey. You don’t need to pay for it if you know about this free alternative: LibreOffice. It’s a free, open-source office suite compatible with Microsoft Office files. Since it’s open-source software, the program is continually updated at no charge.
LibreOffice offers six programs that will feel instantly familiar to you if you’ve used Office before. Writer, Calc and Impress are equivalent to Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. They have most of the same features. You just might need to poke around to find some of them. Even better, LibreOffice can open and edit the documents you made in Office and save new files in Office formats. Download Libre Office here.
Every organisation had its own operating system that supported selected applications until the arrival of Unix. More organisations started adopting Unix because of its portability and universal application. The inexpensive and interactive use of the Unix system transformed the way software engineers thought about programming.
It’s also around this period that the hacking community started tinkering with operating systems. Back then, the term “hacker” was attached to computer experts who pushed computer systems beyond known limits. Somewhere along the way, a new breed of hackers concerned with personal gain (what we know today as cybercriminals) emerged.
If you're still on the fence about Google One, consider this. Eminent privacy advocate Richard Stallman foresaw how cloud computing would make people hand over their data to corporations.
India News: Pharma giants and countries are fighting over vaccine patents as thousands die. There’s a simple, tried and tested option — open-source vaccines.
Alexander Kiryuhin, Jonathan Worthington and vendethiel released Cro 0.8.5, the library for building reactive distributed systems taking advantage of all that the Raku Programming Language has to offer. Most important new features are the use of TCP_NODELAY by default (which improves network performance) and on-demand reloading of templates in development environments.
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Although one can commit a Grant Proposal for a Raku project any time of the year, it is good to sometimes be reminded that another round is coming up to a deadline. So it’s not too late to submit your proposal for the May Round of the Foundation Grants.
In October 2016, John Doe (name changed), a principal engineer at Cisco, was informed by two co-workers that his boss, Sundar Iyer, had told them that he was a Dalit.
Often called “untouchables,” Dalits lie at the bottom of the caste hierarchy in India’s dominant Hindu religion. Although the caste system was officially abolished in 1950, the socio-economic oppression against Dalits has persisted for decades.
At Cisco’s San Jose headquarters in California, Doe was subjected to caste discrimination and “received less pay, fewer opportunities, and other inferior terms and conditions of employment.” When he went to complain against his treatment, the upper-caste boss retaliated by reducing his role.
Security updates have been issued by Debian (libimage-exiftool-perl and postgresql-9.6), Fedora (chromium, exiv2, firefox, kernel, kernel-headers, kernel-tools, mariadb, and python-impacket), Mageia (avahi), openSUSE (chromium, drbd-utils, dtc, ipvsadm, jhead, nagios, netdata, openvpn, opera, prosody, and virtualbox), Slackware (libxml2), SUSE (kernel and lz4), and Ubuntu (intel-microcode, python-eventlet, and rust-pleaser).
The new release of Config::Model::OpenSsh fixes a bugs that impacted experienced users: the order of Hosts or Match sections is now preserved when writing back ~/.ssh/config file.
Why does this matter ?
Well, the beginning of ssh_config man page mentions that “For each parameter, the first obtained value will be used.” and “Since the first obtained value for each parameter is used, more host-specific declarations should be given near the beginning of the file, and general defaults at the end.“.
Looks like I missed these statements when I designed the model for OpenSsh configuration: the Host section was written back in a neat, but wrong, alphabetical order.
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This is now fixed with Config::Model::OpenSsh 2.8.4.3 which is available on cpan and in Debian/experimental.
Don’t let the name “Pretty Good Privacy” mislead you. PGP encryption is the gold standard for encrypted communication and has been used by everyone from nuclear activists to criminals since its invention in 1991. While the execution is complex, the concept is simple: you can encrypt text, making it unreadable to anyone who doesn’t have the key to decode it.
In a Twitter discussion last week on ransomware attacks, KrebsOnSecurity noted that virtually all ransomware strains have a built-in failsafe designed to cover the backsides of the malware purveyors: They simply will not install on a Microsoft Windows computer that already has one of many types of virtual keyboards installed — such as Russian or Ukrainian. So many readers had questions in response to the tweet that I thought it was worth a blog post exploring this one weird cyber defense trick.
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Will installing one of these languages keep your Windows computer safe from all malware? Absolutely not. There is plenty of malware that doesn’t care where in the world you are. And there is no substitute for adopting a defense-in-depth posture, and avoiding risky behaviors online.
But is there really a downside to taking this simple, free, prophylactic approach? None that I can see, other than perhaps a sinking feeling of capitulation. The worst that could happen is that you accidentally toggle the language settings and all your menu options are in Russian.
If this happens (and the first time it does the experience may be a bit jarring) hit the Windows key and the space bar at the same time; if you have more than one language installed you will see the ability to quickly toggle from one to the other. The little box that pops up when one hits that keyboard combo looks like this...
The celebrated scholar Edith Hamilton wanted the world to rediscover the best of ancient Greece—the appreciation of the individual mind.
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Laziness of mind rarely if ever made an appearance in the long life and remarkable work of Edith Hamilton. She celebrated the mind. She thought it was shameful to let one go to waste. In her view, “Mind and spirit together make up that which separates us from the rest of the animal world, that which enables a man to know the truth, and that which enables him to die for the truth.”
In her last three decades, she put her own mind to reawakening popular interest in the great thinkers of the ancient past—and in that noble effort, this homeschooled prodigy indisputably succeeded.
Born in Dresden, Germany to American parents, she grew up in Ft. Wayne, Indiana. Her mother and father desired the best education for their five children. They quickly realized that it was not to be found in the public schools. Edith and her three sisters and one brother were all homeschooled, and each one went on to become an accomplished professional.
One of my favorite things about being an editor is watching other reporters in action. IâÃâ¬Ãâ¢m routinely amazed by their techniques and perseverance, both of which are necessary to produce excellent journalism.
Romania joined the European Union on 1 January 2007. Consequently, the Romanian customs authorities’ responsibility to protect the external border of the European Union increased considerably, as Romania has a significant border with non-EU countries (eg, Serbia, Ukraine and Moldova).
In 2003 specialised IP divisions were set up in 12 existing courts, and in September 2012 these were increased to 21. Moreover, since 2014 cases involving foreign companies have been concentrated in nine of these courts (Milan, Turin, Venice, Genoa, Rome, Naples, Bari, Cagliari and Catania). These divisions have exclusive competence to decide on civil actions relating to trademarks, patents, designs, copyright and unfair competition.
The reality is that foldable smartphones have arrived and are not going anywhere. They did not blow up the market and for a long time will be in demand only by those who are ready to pay more for outlandish devices, regardless of the existing problems with reliability and durability. Samsung is especially busy with projects of devices with flexible displays and is ready to go further in its research.
The Federal Circuit’s new decision in Trimble Inc. v. PerDiemCo LLC reads like my recent Civil Procedure final exam.[1] The topic is personal jurisdiction–when may a Federal Court exercise its power over an out-of-state patentee in a declaratory judgment action challenging the patent’s validity. The holding is important–repeated and specific threats of litigation by an out-of-state patentee can be sufficient to establish personal jurisdiction for a declaratory judgment action.[2] The decision relies upon the an expanded notion of purposeful availment from the Supreme Court’s 2021 decision in Ford,[3] but should also be seen as further limiting the holding of Red Wing Shoe.[4]
In the U.S., personal jurisdiction is handled on a state-by-state basis, even if the case is filed in Federal Court. “Due process” requires a defendant to have sufficient connection with the forum state before a court can exert power over the defendant or the defendant’s assets.[5] This lawsuit was filed in California against PerDiemCo, and so the personal jurisdiction question boils down to whether PerDiemCo has directed its activities toward California in a way that makes jurisdiction fair, just, and reasonable according to our traditions.[6]
As we look for ways to build the post-COVID-19 economy, a recent comprehensive study by the European Patent Office (EPO) has provided some insights on the positive role that innovation and Intellectual Property (IP) rights plays in increasing profitability and creating jobs.
Last year the IPKat started a series recapping patent litigation in some of the major patent litigation jurisdictions in Europe (see reports from the Netherlands, Germany and France). Why? Because we are all facing information overload especially in these times, so Merpel meowed at the AmeriKat to cut through all the noise and just get to the point. So we continue with the series in this the second roundup of Dutch patent litigation addressing fascinating issues such as cross-border jurisdiction, health insurers' reimbursement following from a later discharged PI and an additional question to the equivalence test. Over to the IPKat's friends at Brinkhof in the Netherlands in the form of Barbara Mooij and Alexander de Leeuw:
"In this second roundup of Dutch patent litigation, we dive into some of the noteworthy patent cases of the Dutch courts from July – December 2020. Although the Dutch courts have by now fully adjusted to conducting hearings via video-conference, they remain extremely busy. The amount of case law in the second half of 2020 was similar to the first half of 2020.
In seeking to promote effective and adequate protection of intellectual property rights, South Africa became a signatory to the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) Agreement in 2005. This became the basis for compulsory licenses in South Africa.
South Africa incorporated these provisions into the South African Patents Act 1997 (the Act), under Sections 55 and 56.
Christoph Ann: From a legal perspective, providing for a waiver of IP, mostly patent protection, in an adjusted TRIPS Agreement is conceivable. Depending on how such a provision would be phrased, World Trade Organisation (WTO) members then could be obliged to implement this into national patent law. However, the debate as such is nothing new.
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Whether US pharmaceutical companies like it or not, there are similarities with the South African AIDS pandemic in the late 1990s, where South African president Thabo Mbeki had outright denied HIV being a health problem and kept the country from publicly committing to preventive measures
When the disease got out of hand, South African politics blamed the patent system and patent holders from the developed world. Ultimately, political pressure brought about the compromise of antiretroviral drug producers lowering prices to levels acceptable for both sides. This solution left the patent system intact. For COVID-19 vaccines, the outcome may be somewhat similar.
FS118 European patent protection granted: The European Patent Office (EPO) granted a patent in January 2021 with claims protecting the composition of matter of F-star’s FS118 molecule giving protection until June 2037. The phase 2 proof-of-concept trial of FS118 is proceeding on plan and the Company plans to provide an update on progress in the first half of 2022.
The shift to low-carbon energy (LCE) is a crucial part of addressing the challenges of the climate crisis. Unless emissions are reduced and greener energy is increased, the thresholds for temperature rises outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement could be breached.
That’s according to the European Patent Office (EPO) and the International Energy Agency (IEA), who have issued their second report into the growth of the technologies needed to support the transition to greener types of energy. Called Patents and the energy transition: Global trends in clean energy technology innovation, the report examines the link between patented developments and support for greener energy use. The shift to LCE can only be achieved through an acceleration in energy-sector innovation, the report’s authors state.
Last year's CJEU decision in Santen (C-673/18) was an usually clear judgment on a question that had dogged SPC case law for years: whether there are any circumstances in which an SPC may be based on a second marketing authorisation for a product. In Santen (C-673/18) the CJEU rejected its own previous reasoning on this question and appeared to rule out the possibility of SPCs based on 2nd marketing authorisations (The SPC Blog).
The CJEU decision Santen (C-673/18) has now been applied by the Court of Appeal of Ireland (Merck v Clonmel [2021] IECA 54). The case related to Merck's Ireland SPC for its cholesterol lowering combo-product Inegy (ezetimibe + simvastatin). Interestingly, given the apparent uncompromising position of the CJEU in Santen (C-673/18), the Irish Court of Appeal found that Article 3(d) did not necessarily exclude SPCs based on a marketing authorisations for combination product, even when both of the individual active ingredients in the combination product were covered by previous authorisations.
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Merck already had an SPC for ezetimibe monotherapy (Ezetrol). Both the Ezetrol and Inegy SPCs were based on the same Irish patent (EP (IE) 0 720 599). The patent was directed to compounds for the treatment of atherosclerosis, and explicitly claimed ezetimibe. The known statin simvastatin was mentioned in the description of the patent. Simvastatin had been previously approved for medicinal use. The patent did not explicitly disclose a combo-product comprising ezetimibe and simvastatin. The Irish Court of Appeal therefore found the Inegy SPC invalid under Article 3(a) SPC Regulation as interpreted by the CJEU in Royalty Pharma (C-650/17), whereby a product must be specifically identifiable in the patent on which the SPC is based. The Irish Court of Appeal decision on this point was in line with the Paris Court of Appeal decision on the French Inegy SPC application (as reported by the SPC blog).
Despite already finding the Inegy SPC invalid under Article 3(a), the Irish Court of Appeal also considered whether the SPC complied with Article 3(d). The question was whether the marketing authorisation for Inegy (ezetimibe + simvastatin) was the 1st marketing authorisation to place the product on the market, given the previous approval for Ezetrol (ezetimibe monotherapy). Notably, the Ezetrol marketing authorisation permitted patients to take statins, including simvastatin, in combination with Ezetrol (ezetimibe monotherapy). Nonetheless, the Court of Appeal found that the co-administration of two separate products, ezetimibe and a statin, could not be equated to a marketing authorisation for the comb-product, Inegy. The Court of Appeal thus found that the Inegy SPC did not contravene Article 3(d) of the SPC Regulation.
In the latest development in global patent litigation that has polarized the life sciences industry, Amgen’s patent claims covering a whole class of monoclonal antibody PCSK9 inhibitors have been ruled to be invalid by the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
The US patents cover Amgen’s own antibody evolocumab (branded as Repatha€®), which is used as a cholesterol medication, and the structurally distinct rival antibody alirocumab (branded as Praluent€®) which Sanofi and Regeneron developed independently.
In the last few years, there has been a lot of interest in how artificial intelligence (AI) can be used to improve the drug discovery and development processes. During the global Covid-19 pandemic, many people will have become aware of just how long it takes and how much it costs to develop a drug and release it onto the market. AI is being used by many companies to try to speed-up and increase the efficiency of the process to identify new drugs for new and existing diseases. Sometimes, the AI is used to discover existing drugs that could be used for a different purpose. Often, when the AI identifies a drug, and experiments confirm it is useful for the intended purpose, the drug can be patented. But what about the AI itself – can the AI be protected by patents, and should you try to? In this article, I will share some thoughts on whether it is possible to patent AI tools for drug discovery and drug design.
On May 13, 2021, the Board issued an order terminating IPR2020-01574 pursuant to a joint settlement request filed by Unified Patents and Omnitek Partners LLC, an NPE. U.S. Patent 8,224,569 is generally directed towards a method for generating and displaying driving directions. The patent had been asserted in litigation against Ford, Here Global B.V., Toyota, Apple, and Alpine Electronics, and is still currently asserted against GM, Mazda, and Volvo.
