Sometimes, I ramble on for long periods of time in front of the camera. Today's video is a great example of this. I read a viewer email that asks several important questions regarding transitioning from "noob" to "power user", if distros matter, and if desktop environments matter.
Today, we're going to take a look at the last major desktop environment that I have never really touched, and that's XFCE. This is the first video in a series that will cover the desktop, the default apps, and the customization options.
When I was a performance consultant I'd show up to random companies who wanted me to fix their computer performance issues. If they trusted me with a login to their production servers, I could help them a lot quicker. To get that trust I knew which tools looked but didn't touch: Which were observability tools and which were experimental tools. "I'll start with observability tools only" is something I'd say at the start of every engagement.
The Forge rendering framework that picked up Vulkan and Linux support a few years back is out this week with a new release.
This cross-platform rendering framework can be used by game engines for helping with much of the graphics heavy lifting. Notable with The Forge 1.48 is support for Variable Rate Shading, MSAA being implemented, run-time graphics API switching, a new Python-based shader language translator for going from their FSL shaders to the native graphics language shaders, OpenGL ES 2.0 support improvements, and a variety of other graphics rendering enhancements.
With recently showing desktops and servers enjoying better performance on Ubuntu 21.04 through high end hardware like Xeon Ice Lake, you might be wondering what this means for mobile Linux performance... Here are some quick weekend benchmarks of the Dell XPS laptop with Core i7 1165G7 "Tiger Lake" on Ubuntu 20.10 versus 21.04.
Curious if these Ubuntu 21.04 performance improvements carried through to Intel-powered laptops, I ran some benchmarks on a Core i7 1165G7 laptop across the two latest Ubuntu releases.
EPUB is the short form of Electronic Publication and you might have seen number of book that you have downloaded from internet in this format. Yes this is a common e-book format used by many E-Book software. In this post, we have listed out the some of the top and the best EPUB readers for Linux based operating systems exclusively in 2021.
By releasing version 0.96, the feature-rich screenshot application is finally ported to GTK3, making first step to get back to Ubuntu universe repository.
Shutter 0.96 does no longer depends on goocanvas, Gnome wnck, GTK2 version of image viewer widget, unique and appindicator module. Instead, it now requires GTK3 version of image viewer widget, GooCanvas2, and libwnck-3.
The release also remove the option “Captures only a section of the window”. because it didn’t work with the way how modern Qt and Gtk were drawing their windows anyway.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Polr on CentOS 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Polr is a quick, modern, and open-source link shortener. It allows you to host your own URL shortener, brand your URLs, and gain control over your data. Polr assists you in promoting your online brand since it is more convenient to share short links and gain better insights by tracking clicks to each individual link.
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 Polr URL shortener on a CentOS 8.
Watching a movie or other clip with a conventional 16:9 or old-school 4:3 aspect ratio is a cinch on VLC player. But the rise of smartphones has brought with it one unfortunate side effect – filming videos horizontally (or vertically), then rotating the camera after you started recording.
This means that when you open the culprit video in a video player like VLC, you need to rotate it to make it properly watchable. Here we show you not only how to rotate a video in VLC but how to save it after it’s been rotated.
Cities Skylines is a 2015 city-building game developed by Colossal Order and published by Paradox Interactive. The game is single-player and allows for building cities and infrastructure on a massive, realistic scale. In this guide, we’ll show you how to play it on Linux.
Creating a bootable USB drive is not a difficult task, we just need the right software for our Linux operating system. Due to the limited shelf life of DVDs or CDs, people are moving towards Pen drive, thus this is the reason why most of us are now using USB drives to install operating systems on our Laptop or PC.
Here we will learn the process of how to create a Debian 11 or 10 Buster bootable Pen drive…
We have been using the yum or rpm package management tools for a while for managing packages in Redhat, Centos and other distributions which have been forked from RHEL. Yum has been the default package manager since Redhat Enterprise Linux 5 onwards. Before yum, RHEL systems had been using the up2date software management program. The DNF package manager was introduced in Fedora 18 and became the default package manager for the Fedora distribution for operating system version Fedora 22 onwards and is intended to be a replacement for yum.
In this article, we will compare these package managers to provide some perspective as to when and why you should consider using one over the other.
Google CLoud like it’s popular contemporary cloud vendors offers a means to manage cloud resources via the command line. The folks at GCP refer to this command line interface as cloud shell and it uses the gcloud sdk. One of the benefits of using cloud shell is that it can be launched directly from the Google Cloud console. In this post, we’ll demonstrate how to familiarize yourself with cloud shell while explaining some Google Cloud terminology along the way.
Bloggers and Developers who are running and managing their own servers, well of course they are responsible for its security as well. If in today’s world we don’t give heed to security then there is the possibility that our server would become a target of attackers – and cause damage. Well, although there are various online WAF, however, to harden the server an open-source program is available called Fail2Ban. It ensures that the IP address of an attacker is blocked for a certain period of time after several unsuccessful attempts and thus prevents an unlimited number of attempts that could later lead to finding out the password.
Lubuntu is an open-source Linux distribution based on Ubuntu. The OS is super light, has fewer resource requirements, and uses the LXQT modern desktop environment. Before you initiate the installation process of Lubuntu, you need to download the correct Iso image that matches your computer’s specs.
Lubuntu supports 64-bit operating systems with an up-to-date release every six months for short-term support versions and a long-term version release every 2 years. It is unfortunate for 32-bit system users since they dropped releasing new versions for Operating systems below 18.04LTS. However, the 18.04LTS for the 32-bit system is supported until 2021.
As discussed earlier, you realized that Lubuntu offers two types of releases. The Long-Term Support (LTS) is recommended to many because its image is fully supported to function well with updates via the kernel and short-term support, which is less supported than the long-term support. LTS is generally supported for as long as three years.
This is a beginner’s guide that shows the steps you need to follow for setting up XRDP on Ubuntu-based Linux distributions. With this, you can access your Ubuntu system from a different computer and use it graphically.
Tomcat is an open-source web server for Java-based web applications. It is used in development with Spring and JSP. In this guide, you will learn how to install and configure Tomcat version 9 on Ubuntu, Debian, or any of their derivatives.
Apache Tomcat is an open-source web server, allowing you to execute java code. It can execute Java-related technologies such as Java Servlet, JSP, Java Expression Language, WebSockets, etc. Being open-source, Tomcat is mainly developed and maintained by open community developers under the Apache software foundation.
So let’s how to install and configure Tomcat in Ubuntu or Debian and demonstrate a JSP program.
This is an transparent image that I made in Inkscape. The shadows is added with CSS.
It's time for the Sunday Section once again here on GamingOnLinux, going over some Linux gaming topics and other miscellaneous Linux topics we missed recently. Grab a coffee and enjoy a little read.
Collabora have written up a new blog post about their continuing work with virglrenderer, a virtual OpenGL renderer. The idea is to get OpenGL performing well inside virtual machines to help with all sorts of workloads (like gaming!). Collabora has been using Perfetto, an open-source project for performance instrumentation and tracing, to analyse virglrenderer and they've managed to give a number of applications a nice little bump in performance like the Unigine Heaven benchmark seeing a 6.2% increase in FPS.
Mike Blumenkrantz. currently under contract with Valve, has another blog post up on their with with Zink, the OpenGL over Vulkan driver. Blumenkrantz mentions a huge amount of work went into it recently to reduce the driver overhead, a working disk cache implementation and more. The work has resulted in a huge performance boost of Zink being "100%-1000% faster" where "in most scenarios where it was previously much slower than native GL drivers". Quite a big win there then.
And so we start sharing some of the results of the survey we have conducted with many of you in the course of April 2021, with our Linux Gamers Survey for Q2 2021. This time we will focus more specifically on the Cloud Gaming section. By the way, you may want to check the very informative article from cow_killer about the different Cloud Gaming options available for Linux gamers.
In the survey, we were interested to see how many of you have already used any of the available Cloud Gaming solutions in the past. Turns out, most of you have not!
Following the recent release of our new podcast with Luke Short, please find the transcript below! You may not be familiar with him yet, but Luke Short is a former Red Hat employee and is currently employed at VMWare, specialized in cloud deployments (Kubernetes) – in his private time he happens to have a liking for Chromebooks and ChromeOS. Back in March 2021, he wrote a full article dedicated to the progress of several technologies that would make it possible at some point to run Steam directly on Chromebooks (x86 ones). We have therefore invited him to learn more about this topic. “Steam will run on ChromeOS” also happens to be is one of the most common predictions we had compiled for 2021 along with active folks on the Linux gaming scene.
Hello! This is the first entry in a hopefully reoccurring series of blog posts about the KDE Goals.
The purpose of this series is to provide a frequent update about the Goals, to highlight what cool things are happening.
Of course, our Goal Champions can still create additional content about their goals in any form they want: short blog posts, videos, in-depth articles, etc. This blog will aggregate that content and also give the champions a way to share quick updates without spending too much time blogging.
And with that, let’s take a look at the updates!
KDE’s approach is so much better and more sane than the CSDs in GNOME. CSDs have wreaked havoc in the world of GTK desktops, with Xfce in particular suffering hard due to its use of Xfwm, causing a giant rift between the looks of Xfwm and the CSDs of many GTK applications. The main issue here is that a title bar is a title bar for a reason – I don’t want it littered with buttons and other widgets that belong to the application, not the window.
Elementary OS is fast privacy concerning Windows and macOS replacement. This OS is designed with an emphasis on security, user-friendliness, and beauty. If you cherish the look and feel of macOS, then you should try out the Elementary OS. It is ranked as one of the easiest to use Linux distros ever.
You might have come across this exciting operating system or plan to install it in the future, and you have no clue where to begin and why to install it. Here is a comprehensive guide on why you should install the elementary OS.
AntiX is a lightweight Linux distro that can run on old computers without any problems. The project releases its latest bug-fix, updated version antiX 19.3 based on stable Debian 10 Buster.
The goal of antiX is to provide a light, but fully functional and flexible free operating system for both newcomers and experienced Linux users. You need at least 256MB RAM, and the installer needs minimum 4.0GB hard disk size. So, If you are looking to revive your old hardware with Linux, well you can give antiX a try.
Today marks the 90th day of me joining Canonical to work on Ubuntu full-time! So since it’s been a while already, this blog post is long due. :)
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Those who know, they know that this is really very exciting for me because Canonical has been a dream company for me, for real (more about this below!). And hey, this is my first job, ever, so all the more reason to be psyched about, isn’t it? ^_^
The low-cost Rock Pi 4 SBC was unveiled in 2018 with a Rockchip RK3399 processor, up to 4GB RAM, and Raspberry Pi 3 form factor. Rock Pi 4 Plus builds on the relatively popular single board computer with an upgrade to Rockchip OP1 processor, which is a higher performance RK3399 SoC typically used in Chromebooks and ASUS Tinker Board 2.
The new board also adds 16 to 128 GB eMMC flash, instead of relying on an optional eMMC module, and will come pre-loaded with Twister OS Armbian lightweight desktop OS based upon Armbian Focal 20.04.1 LTS (aarch64) for Rockchip RK3399-based SBCs.
You can imagine the microprocessors needed to control all of this are pretty minimal. The team used an Arduino, I'd opt for the Raspberry Pi Pico, but you could use whatever you wanted - it's not a difficult control problem.
Until recently one of the main things keeping the PinePhone from being a smartphone most people could use as a daily driver was battery life – when my PinePhone arrived in September, 2020 I couldn’t find an operating system that would offer more than a day or so of battery life while idle, let alone during active use.
But thanks to an active development community, PinePhone battery life is getting better all the time. Now developer Megi, who maintains a custom Linux kernel optimized for Pine64’s Linux phone, says the latest versions offer support for up to 6 days of standby or idle time.
And that’s just one of many improvements in Megi’s Linux 5.12 and 5.13 kernels.
Libreboot is free (as in freedom) boot firmware, which initializes the hardware (e.g. memory controller, CPU, peripherals) in your computer so that software can run. Libreboot then starts a bootloader to load your operating system. It replaces the proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware typically found on a computer. Libreboot is compatible with specifical computer models that use the Intel/AMD x86 architecture. Libreboot works well with GNU+Linux and BSD operating systems.
The last Libreboot release, version 20160907, was released on September 7th in 2016. This new release, Libreboot 20210522, is being released today on May 22nd, 2021. This is a testing release, so expect there to be some bugs. Every effort has been made to ensure reliability on all boards, however.
You can find this release in the testing directory on Libreboot release mirrors. If you check in the stable directory, you’ll still only find the 20160907 release in there, so please ensure that you check the testing directory!
Libreboot as the Coreboot downstream focused on providing a fully open-source BIOS/firmware replacement without any black boxes / binary blobs is out with a new release. The prior tagged release of Libreboot was all the way back in 2016 while has now been succeeded by a new release albeit in testing form.
Libreboot 20210522 allows more Intel GM45 / X3X era hardware to work with this fully open-source alternative to proprietary BIOS/UEFI firmware. New boards supported by this Libreboot release include the Acer G43T-AM3, Lenovo ThinkPad R500, Lenovo ThinkPad X301, and Intel G43T-AM3. Yeah, it's quite hard in 2021 to get excited about Socket 775 motherboards or 45nm Penryn laptops. Libreboot is largely limited to supporting these outdated platforms due to its focus on being fully open-source and not using any Intel FSP binaries, etc.
Java was released in 1995, making it 26 years old as I'm writing this. It was proprietary at first, but in 2007, Java was released as open source under the GPL. To understand what makes Java important, you have to understand the problem it claims to solve. Then you can understand why and how it benefits developers and users.
The best way to understand what Java solves is to develop software, but just using software is a good start, too. As a developer, your troubles are likely to begin when you send software that works perfectly on your own computer to some other computer; it probably won't work. It should work, but as any programmer knows, something always gets overlooked. This is compounded when you try the software on another operating system (OS). It's why there are so many download buttons on any given software site: a button for Windows, for macOS, for Linux, for mobiles, and sometimes even more.
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All the popular programming languages have great support systems in place. It's what makes popular languages popular. They all have lots of libraries; there are integrated development environments (IDEs) or IDE extensions for them, example code, free and paid training, and communities of developers. On the other hand, no programming language seems to have quite enough support when you get stuck trying to make something work.
I can't claim that Java can differentiate itself from these two universal but contradictory truths. Still, I have found that when I need a library for Java, I inevitably find not just one but several options for a given task. Often I don't want to use a library because I don't like how its developer chose to implement the functions I need, its license is a little different from what I prefer, or any other trivial point of contention. When there's bountiful support for a language, I have the luxury of being very selective. I get to choose one—among many perfectly suitable solutions—that will best achieve any requirement, however trivial.
Better yet, there's a healthy infrastructure around Java. Tools like Apache Ant, Gradle, and Maven help you manage your build and delivery process. Services like Sonatype Nexus help you monitor security. Spring and Grails make it easy to develop for the web, while Quarkus and Eclipse Che help with cloud development.
Sources from the generics industry claim long delays for opposition hearings and abuse of the divisional system has led to business uncertainty
As usual when getting my hands on a new processor family, I was curious about the performance difference if booting the Xeon Platinum 8380 "Ice Lake" processors with the Spectre security mitigations disabled at run-time. Ultimately there was very little difference when using the standard "mitigations=off" option for these new Intel server processors.
Intel 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable "ice Lake" processors are not affected by Meltdown, MDS, L1TF, ITLB Multihit, SRBDS, or TAA, but do still require kernel protections involving Spectre V1/V2/V4. Spectre V1 mitigation on the Ice Lake server CPUs involve usercopy/SWAPGS barriers and __user pointer sanitization, Spectre V2 on these new CPUs involves enhanced IBRS (Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation) and conditional IBPB (Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier) and RSB (Return Stack Buffer) filling.
SpicyIP analysed an interim order which was recently issued by the Delhi High Court, discussing the right to be forgotten and directing Google to remove a judgement on the petitioner’s acquittal from their search results and Indian Kanoon to block the judgment from being accessed by search engines.
We’re pleased to bring to you a guest post by Sriya Sridhar, analysing an interim order recently issued by the Delhi High Court discussing the right to be forgotten and directing Google to remove a judgement on the petitioner’s acquittal from their search results and Indian Kanoon to block the judgment from being accessed by search engines. Sriya graduated from Jindal Global Law School in 2020, and is now a lawyer specialising in IP and Technology law.
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India’s tryst with the RTBF, vis-à-vis court orders, has been a journey of inconsistency, in the absence of data protection legislation. In 2016, the Kerala High Court passed an interim order requiring IndianKanoon to remove the name of a rape victim published on the website which had published two judgments rendered by the Kerala High Court in writ petitions filed by her. The court recognised the petitioner’s right to privacy and reputation, without explicitly using the term RTBF. In 2017, a petitioner approached the Gujarat High Court for “permanent restraint on public exhibition of judgment and order” on an online repository of judgments and indexing by Google, as he had been acquitted of several offences by the Sessions Court and High Court and the judgment in question was classified as ‘unreportable’. Unlike in Kerala, the Court dismissed the petition on the grounds that the petitioner was not able to point out any provisions in law that posed a threat to his right to life and liberty, and that publication on a website did not amount to ‘reporting’ of a judgment since it is not a law report. Once again, RTBF was not discussed in detail.
The Karnataka High Court then took a turn in the opposite direction, in 2018. The petitioner’s daughter had instituted civil and criminal proceedings against a person, subsequently reaching a compromise and stipulating that the proceedings would be quashed. The petitioner contended that his daughter’s right to privacy would be violated due to her name being present in the cause title. Holding in the petitioner’s favour, the Court directed the registry to mask her name throughout the order, and endeavour to ensure that any internet search of the order does not reveal her name. The reasoning behind this was that this would be in line with the “trend” in Western countries where RTBF is followed as a rule in sensitive cases involving the modesty of women. While this observation is inaccurate even in the context of the RTBF judgments in the EU, this judgment causes even more confusion given that the RTBF was not located in the right to privacy or Article 21 even post the Puttaswamy judgment.
Stephan Kinsella is an incredible scholar of the Austrian school of praxeology, his major contribution is the advancement of the arguments in favor of property of scarce goods, and against intellectual property of non-scarce goods.
We are constantly warning you about the danger of misleading invoices. Such letters requesting payment or offering a service seem to come from the BOIP, EUIPO, WIPO or another official body. However, be careful, these are scams!
Trademark registers can be viewed by everyone, even by crooks. Said crooks regularly take note of the contact details of the trademark owners in order to send them misleading invoices. Please be warned that fraudulent invoices are becoming more and more convincing.
While unfortunately such fraudulent behaviors are rife, it is a relief to see that some scammers are from time to time punished!
Indeed, following a case brought in 2011 by the BMM (Benelux Association for Trademark and Design Law), the District Court of Brussels sentenced four years of prison to one member of a large criminal network.
The European Commission (Commission) has published its Report on the protection and enforcement of intellectual property (IP) rights in countries outside of the European Union in which the state of IP protection and enforcement gives rise to the greatest concern and provides an update of the existing Commission's list of priority countries.
Vice Chief Administrative Patent Judge Michael Tierney of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board and George "Trey" Lyons, III of McDonnell Boehnen Hulbert & Berghoff LLP will look at changes to, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on, AIA Trial Proceedings, including: discretionary denials, motion to amend pilot program, ۤ 101, and appealability, as well as lessons learned from the pandemic that will influence PTAB practice moving forward.
With the Brazil Supreme Court having removed the guarantee of a 10-year term for successful patents – retroactively for pharma and medical device technologies – in-house counsel are planning to analyse the patent landscape and speed up prosecution, according to five sources.
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President Joe Biden named Colleen Chien as a senior counsellor at the US Department of Commerce's Office of General Counsel on Tuesday, May 18.
Chien had been spoken of as a potential candidate for USPTO director, and it is unclear whether she could still take up that role. She is a professor at Santa Clara University School of Law and previously served in the Obama administration as senior adviser on intellectual property and innovation to the chief technology officer. She was also a volunteer as part of the Biden-Harris transition team.
Chien was one of Managing IP’s 50 Most Influential People in IP in 2013. She was recognised for her work studying and fighting patent assertion entities – which included coining that term as an alternative to non-practising entity.
In 2019, she wrote a letter, along with Mark Lemley of Stanford Law School, Melissa Wasserman at the University of Texas School of Law and several other professors, expressing concern about the proposed STRONGER Patents Act.
The act was intended to strengthen US patent rights [sic] by reforming injunctive relief and inter partes reviews at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
Chien and the other signatories argued against a provision of the bill that would have limited petitioners to filing one petition per patent claim, and said that the provision ignored the realities of patent litigation.
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China has indicated apparent support to a call from developing countries to waive intellectual property rights for COVID-19 vaccines.
“China fully understands and is supportive of the developing world’s demand for [an] IP rights waiver for COVID-19 vaccines,” foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said on Monday, May 17, according to the South China Morning Post.
“This would be in line with the idea that COVID-19 vaccines are a ‘global public good’, and part and parcel of [China’s] efforts to build a global community of health for all,” he added.
I have been asked many times what I make of the debates about the TRIPS waiver. I had decided not to comment, especially on social media where it seems to be 50 shades of black and white. After listening to the “for” and “against” debate in the European Parliament, however, I decided to put a few thoughts on paper (well, on the screen) because for or against the waiver strikes me as the wrong debate.
First, it is not a matter of being for or against *the* waiver. In the end, there is likely to be *a* waiver, with specific provisions about, inter alia (think of it as turning three knobs): (a) which rights are waived; (b) for which purpose and (c) for which period of time. It is possible that the WTO will actually vote on this waiver, though WTO practice would more typically look for a text-based consensus, turning the three knobs (and finding other knobs to turn) until everyone can agree—if at all possible. But whatever the outcome of that debate, it is unlikely fully to address four key issues concerning the effectiveness of the waiver, nor does it directly answer deeper questions about the future of pharmaceutical research.
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This should be possible, as some very recent pre-pandemic applications concerning mRNA vaccines for coronaviruses (not SARS-Cov-2) have not only been published but already granted (for example Moderna’s US patent 10,933,127 B2, issued March 2021).
One might also ask whether voluntary licenses (presumably with know-how transfer) are or will be available. In that context, some observers who know the inner workings of the WTO have suggested that the push for the waiver may be a way to get leverage in discussion between governments and pharmaceutical companies.
My second issue is: what idle capacity exists? Production capacity is necessary for third party manufacturers (and then people) to benefit from the waiver. It looks like this capacity exists, as Teva, among others, seems ready willing and able to produce vaccines. As far as I can see (and I may well be wrong), precise idle capacity had not been well documented until fairly recently.
The European Commission defended using compulsory licences rather than lifting patents on Covid-19 vaccines on Wednesday, calling the United States’ stance in favour of the latter “a nice media stunt.”
“Whatever respect one may have for [US President] Joe Biden, this announcement on the lifting of patents is just a nice media stunt, given that the United States exports almost no vaccines or vaccine components,” said Frédérique Ries (MR, Renew Europe).
Ries called for encouraging knowledge sharing and technology transfer, as well as the establishment of production facilities, especially in Africa.
An important comment on the figures is that not all innovations in horticulture are protected by a patent. Confidentiality, plant breeders' rights, trademark rights and copyright are other intellectual property rights that are used in this sector, among others, to a greater or lesser extent. In the top sector of horticulture, for example, plant breeders' rights are used by many more companies and secrecy is also, as can be read in the report, 'in many cases a valuable alternative to patents'.
The confirmation that the Blackberry patent portfolio is up for sale will test the market’s appetite for the kind of mega-deal that we haven’t seen in some time. There are also indications that key parts of the LG Electronics portfolio are open to offers. The prospect of big legacy patent holdings being on the move is always a good story, but I’m equally interested in novel deal structures. One of the most interesting transactions so far this year was the settlement of a long-running dispute between SK Hynix and Netlist, which involved a chip supply agreement – a valuable asset indeed amidst a semiconductor shortage that nobody expects to ease soon. What other fresh approaches to IP deals might result from the exigencies of this very strange business environment we’re in?
Chinese companies have filed the most number of patents in 2020 at the European Patent Office.
Pharmaceuticals and biotechnology patents had the biggest jump in filings last year, which is unsurprising given the global health concern brought on by the coronavirus. Most research and development (R&D) projects undertaken last year targeted a cure for the coronavirus.
With 3,113 applications, Huawei was again the most active patent applicant from China at the EPO, followed by Guangdong Oppo Mobile (715), Xiaomi (603), BOE Technology (556), and ZTE (458).
Against the backdrop of a year characterised by heightened awareness of the biotech and pharmaceutical sectors, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was fittingly awarded to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna for their contributions to the development of CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing.
Attorneys should educate themselves on the practices of individual courts and judges, and make their arguments as simple as possible
Soligenix, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNGX) (Soligenix or the Company), a late-stage biopharmaceutical company focused on developing and commercializing products to treat rare diseases where there is an unmet medical need, announced today that the Japan Patent Office has allowed the patent application titled "Systems and Methods for Producing Synthetic Hypericin". The allowed claims are directed to unique, proprietary methods to produce a novel, highly purified form of synthetic hypericin, and are similar to those previously allowed in the United States (U.S.). Synthetic hypericin is the active pharmaceutical ingredient in HyBryteâ⢠(SGX301), the Company's photodynamic therapy, for which positive primary endpoint results in a pivotal Phase 3 study for the treatment of cutaneous T-cell lymphoma (CTCL) were recently announced. This new patent is the first allowed in Japan covering the proprietary methods developed by the Company and further expands the comprehensive HyBryteâ⢠patent estate, which includes protection on the composition of the purified synthetic hypericin, methods of synthesis and therapeutic methods of use in both CTCL and psoriasis, and is being pursued worldwide.
In the present case, the appeals lodged by the opponent and the patent proprietor lie from the interlocutory decision of the opposition division that the European patent No 1 369 037 in amended form. Third party observations were submitted in an early stage of the appeal proceedings, as well as in later stages, objecting to novelty and to inventive step w.r.t. newly field documents (existing grounds, but new facts, arguments and evidence). The patent proprietor requested that the third-party observations, with all the documents and annexes referred to in the observations, not be admitted into the proceedings as they were late-filed. However, the RPBA seems to only impose constraints on late-file submissions by parties, as does Art. 114(2) EPC, and not by third parties. How did the Board handle these third party observations: were they admitted and, if so, to what extent?
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I. The appeals lodged by the opponent and the patent proprietor lie from the interlocutory decision of the opposition division that European patent No 1 369 037 in amended form according to the fourth auxiliary request comprising the set of claims filed on 12 May 2015 met the requirements of the EPC.
Factors like the rise of the vast network of data-sharing devices known as the Internet of Things have led to smartphone apps becoming deeply rooted in consumers' daily lives, addressing needs ranging from navigation and finance to leisure and health. Google and Apple Maps are some of the most obvious big names, but for a more recent example, consider the Corona-Warn app available in Germany, which helps track actual or possible exposure to COVID-19 and contact with others.
The Supreme Court should release its Arthrex decision within the next 3-4 weeks on whether PTAB Judges were appointed in accordance with US Constitutional requirements. Officers of the United States must be nominated by the President and confirmed by the Senate; inferior Officers may be appointed by a head-of-department if authorized by Congress. US Const. Art. II, Sec. 2, Cl. 2. PTAB Judges were implicitly deemed inferior officers by Congress and appointment authority given to the Secretary of Commerce. However, in Arthrex, the Federal Circuit ruled that the Judges had significant independent authority and thus must be considered Principal Officers. The case was argued to the Supreme Court on March 1, 2021 and the court is set to decide (1) whether the PTAB judges are Principal Officers; and (2) if so, what result? The outcome has the potential to impact several thousand PTAB decisions — either by rendering them void or by confirming their validity.
The Cure: As part of its Arthrex decision, the Federal Circuit struck-out an employment protection provision as it applied to PTAB Judges; and then ruled that, without those employment protections that PTAB judges were reduced to inferior officers. The court then ruled that its on-the-fly ointment applied cure to any post-Arthrex PTAB decision.
Another chocolate dispute in trademark matters is ruled by the German Federal Court.
In our fifth and final data-led article on EUTM filings, Managing IP speaks to a division of pharma company Servier, and others, to assess trademark filing trends in France
In the midst of a pre-existing play for control over “by Chloe,” the swiftly-growing vegan restaurant chain that she co-founded in 2015, Chloe Coscarelli has filed a trademark infringement lawsuit against private-equity firm Bain Capital LP and a number of the other big-name investors in furtherance of what Coscarelli calls a case about “a circle of greed.” According to the complaint that she filed in a New York federal court on Monday, Coscarelli claims that the defendants, which “include some of the largest private equity firms in the world with over $130 billion in assets under their management, teamed up with ESquared Hospitality and James Haber … to profit off [her] name,” and in the process, “prioritized their own financial self-interest over what was right and lawful.”
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In the midst of Haber’s “scheme to ‘milk’ Chloe’s name” without her involvement or authorization, Coscarelli asserts that her corporate entity Chef Chloe LLC and ESquared “were litigating various disputes” related to ownership of the company. For one thing, Coscarelli had filed a trademark infringement, federal unfair competition, and breach of contract suit against ESquared in March 2018, in which she sought a judgment declaring that Chef Chloe LLC still maintained a 50 percent stake in the company and approval rights in connection with her name, and an injunction barring ESquared from using her name in connection with any products/projects beyond the restaurant chain without her authorization. And in a May 2020 decision, an arbitrator sided with Coscarelli.
In addition to finding that ESquared did not have the right to seize Coscarelli’s stake in the company as a result of a previous dispute, the arbitrator held that an operating agreement entered into by Chef Chloe LLC and ESquared “did not strip Chef Chloe of approval rights for future expansion of trademark usage as one of its penalties for termination as a member.” Ultimately, as Dorsey & Whitney’s Melonie Jordan previously wrote, “The arbitrator stated that Chef Chloe must ‘abide by the deal that she made with the company to continue to use her first name as the name of the restaurant, but likewise [ESquared] must abide by the terms of the deal that it struck with Chef Chloe not to expand the use [of] the trademark beyond fast casual restaurants without getting her pre-approval.'”
Fast forward to early this year, and Judge Jesse Furman of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York confirmed the arbitrator’s determination, including that Coscarelli maintains an undiluted 50 percent interest in the by Chloe brand, as well as approval rights for the usage of her name when it comes to “expanding the use [of] the trademark beyond fast casual restaurants,” and awarded Coscarelli over $2.2 million in attorneys’ fees and costs.
