This is the first 9to5Linux Weekly Roundup edition in 2022 and it brings you news about the upcoming releases of Ubuntu Touch OTA-21 and Linux Lite 5.8 distributions, the end of life of CentOS Linux 8, a major postmarketOS release for ARM devices, and new major releases of the Avidemux video editor and Pinta paint program.
On top of that, I take a look at Xfce’s app releases for December 2021 and Garuda Linux’s first release in 2022. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for January 2nd, 2022, below!
I hope you are doing well and had a happy New Year celebration. I wish that it will be a wonderful year for you.
We, as expected, had a peaceful week in the world of Linux release with Linux Lite 5.8 RC1, Neptune Linux 7.0, and Garuda Linux 220101.
Generally speaking, when I review a distribution the experience exists in a sort of bubble for me. That is, I'm very interested in the operating system while it is in front of me. I'm intrigued by its features, I'm curious about its infrastructure, and I try to slide into the workflow of its desktop environment and tools. However, when my week with the distribution is over I tend to put it out of my mind. I don't often dwell on a particular problem or special feature of the distribution once I've started trying something else, unless the distro presented a feature or concept that was especially useful for me.
This year though I started making an effort to keep certain distributions in mind - bookmarking them in my brain, in a manner of speaking. Recently I've had more people ask me about which distributions are my favourites or which projects I'd be more likely to recommend for someone new. I've also felt like it would make it easier for me to evaluate some projects if I had a "high water mark" of quality against which I could compare new distributions.
With this in mind, starting in the early days of 2021, I began making note of when a distribution impressed me. Sometimes a distribution would just not do anything wrong or annoy me. Other times a distribution offered a particularly nice feature or seemed unusually user friendly. As we march into 2022 I'd like to take a look back at some of the distributions which stood out this past year as especially pleasant or interesting to use and explain why. This list is more or less in chronological order (the order in which I used the distribution) rather than by alphabetical order or in order of quality.
Never looked at it like that, huh? Well you should. Proprietary and predatory software corporations are eating FLOSS’s lunch in the public sector because (among other things) they have accessibility all figured out, and are officially sanctioned to sell their software for very vulnerable people; people, able-bodied and not, who need us most: students, patients, doctors, nurses, teachers, inmates, civil servants; people who are easily exploited by proprietary software mega-corporations and need to be able to reclaim control over the technology they use asap.
But we’re not listening. We are busy solving edge-cases, such as glitches in 8K monitors with different frame rates; or making Angry Pigeons, or whatever the f**k kids are playing these days, run 100 FPS faster. None of that is going to help them.
Accessibility is.
In this video, we are looking at Linux Lite 5.8 RC1.
Today we are looking at Linux Lite 5.8 RC1. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.4, based on Ubuntu 20.04, XFCE 4.14, and uses about 600 - 800 MB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
A lot of people say that you don't need to reboot linux, but what actually happens if you do this and why do I say always just reboot.
On this episode of This Week in Linux, a Christmas Gift from Jon Maddog Hall of Linus talk from DECUS 1994, Krita 5.0, Darktable 3.8, OBS Studio 27.2 Flatpaks & Red Hat, OpenRGB 0.7, Firefox 95, GIMP 2.10.30, AppImage Pool: App Store for AppImages, Libadwaita 1.0, Enlightenment 0.25, Maui Shell: Convergent Desktop, Tails 4.25, Kali Linux 2021.4, Calculate Linux 22, Steam Winter Sale & Steam Awards, PS5 Controller as a Linux Touchpad! All that and much more on Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
I'm pleased to announce the first public version of my new "Fast Kernel Headers" project that I've been working on since late 2020, which is a comprehensive rework of the Linux kernel's header hierarchy & header dependencies, with the dual goals of:
- speeding up the kernel build (both absolute and incremental build times)
- decoupling subsystem type & API definitions from each other
The fast-headers tree consists of over 25 sub-trees internally, spanning over 2,200 commits, which can be found here:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/mingo/tip.git master
As most kernel developers know, there's around ~10,000 main .h headers in the Linux kernel, in the include/ and arch/*/include/ hierarchies. Over the last 30+ years they have grown into a complicated & painful set of cross-dependencies we are affectionately calling 'Dependency Hell'.
Kernel developer Ingo Molnar has been quiet for a while; now we know why. He has just announced a massive set of patches (touching over half of the files in the kernel tree) reworking how header files are handled.
Longtime Linux kernel developer Ingo Molnar posted a massive set of patches today: 2,297 patches that have been in the works since late 2020 and completely rework the Linux kernel's header file hierarchy. The goal of this "fast kernel headers" effort is to speed up kernel build times and also clean=up a lot of things in the proces to address the "dependency hell".
This massive set of patches touches most of the Linux kernel code-base as it reworks the header file handling for the kernel builds. But the end result is faster Linux kernel compilations both for clean builds and incremental builds.
Molnar wrote in the patch cover letter, "As most kernel developers know, there's around ~10,000 main .h headers in the Linux kernel, in the include/ and arch/*/include/ hierarchies. Over the last 30+ years they have grown into a complicated & painful set of cross-dependencies we are affectionately calling 'Dependency Hell'."
So as expected, this is a tiny rc - there really hasn't been a lot going on during the holidays. Even now, not everybody is necessarily back, and we'll likely have another very quiet upcoming week and then I'll do the real 5.16 release and we'll hopefully be more or less back to normal (and thanks to the people who have already sent me pending pull request for 5.17 - it helps me to have them early, since I'll unfortunately have some travel during the upcoming merge window).
The bulk here (and "bulk" is probably the wrong word to use, it's all pretty small) is gpu and networking drivers, and some core networking fixes. There's some other minor noise in here too (usb, i2c, input, auxdisplay, scsi, perf tooling), but it's all very small.
Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend.
Linus
The eighth and final 5.16 kernel prepatch is out for testing. "Please, as you emerge from your holiday-induced food coma, do give it a quick test so that we can all be happy about the final release next weekend".
Linux 5.16-rc8 is out today as a tiny holiday test candidate. If it weren't for the holidays, Linus Torvalds would have released the Linux 5.16 kernel today as stable but instead opted for an extra week of post-holiday testing.
Not much has changed with Linux 5.16-rc8 given that it was brewed the week between Christmas and New Year's. Linus also expects this forthcoming week to be light due to developers recovering from the holidays. Linux 5.16-rc8 brings just a few fixes to the GPU and networking drivers, among other random fixes thoguhout.
While the Linux 5.16 kernel release and in turn the Linux 5.17 merge window isn't happening for another week, the media subsystem pull request for v5.17 has already been mailed out with its various feature changes for this next cycle.
The Hantro media driver for the Hantro IP found in the VPU of Rockchip and NXP i.MX SoCs has added VP9 codec support as one of the exciting media changes for Linux 5.17.
This Hantro media driver support for VP9 is known to work with the Rockchip VDEC and VeriSilicon Hantro G2. As part of this media activity, support for the Allwinner H6 is being introduced this cycle for the Hantro media driver and there that Allwinner SoC is exposing VP9 acceleration. This Hantro VP9 support has also resulted in new V4L2 core helper functions around the VP9 codec.
In the mainline Linux kernel for a year now has been the Intel variable rate refresh (VRR) support for Gen12 / Xe Graphics and then with the upcoming Linux 5.17 cycle that's being enabled for Gen11 Ice Lake graphics too. With the Intel i915 DRM kernel driver support for VRR/Adaptive-Sync being mature, the Intel Mesa OpenGL and Vulkan driver components are finally enabling the support by default.
For a year has been the Mesa merge request to go ahead and enable Adaptive-Sync for their "Iris" Gallium3D OpenGL and "ANV" Vulkan open-source drivers on Linux. The changes are trivial with just toggling the DRI_CONF_ADAPTIVE_SYNC option for Mesa's integration around the DRM Variable Refresh Rate API.... That Mesa DRM VRR API integration was previously tackled by AMD developers working on their VRR/FreeSync/Adaptive-Sync support years ago. All of the vendor-specific magic happens within the kernel drivers around this feature for reducing tearing and stuttering within games.
Mesa's Radeon Vulkan driver "RADV" now is making use of the common synchronization framework started by Intel "ANV" Vulkan driver developers to allow for more code sharing between the drivers.
A few months back Jason Ekstrand and other Intel developers began working on the common synchronization code for Mesa's Vulkan drivers. Due to complexities of VK_KHR_timeline_semaphore in particular, it was decided to pursue a common solution to avoid extra per-driver complexities and would help in the bring-up of future drivers.
The Paint.NET inspired bitmap image drawing and editing software Pinta 2.0 was released a few days ago.
Pinta is finally ported to GTK3, though GNOME now is shifting to GTK4. Along with .NET6 the UI now looks more native in Ubuntu...
As you already know Kali is an open-source, Debian-based Linux distribution that was previously known as BackTrack. It aims for advanced penetration testing and security auditing. If you have forgotten your root password and want to reset Kali Linux password this is the best tutorial. You can also decide to go back to default settings and see what the default “root” credentials are.
Java is a general-purpose, class-based, object-oriented multipurpose programming language that is popular due to the design of having lesser implementation dependencies, meaning that the compiled Java code can be run on all platforms that support Java without the need for recompilation. Java is also fast, secure, and reliable, therefore. It is widely used for developing Java applications in laptops, data centers, game consoles, scientific supercomputers, cell phones, etc.
JDK 17 (JDK 17) has brought forward new language enhancements, updates to the libraries, support for new Apple computers, removals and deprecations of legacy features, and work to ensure Java code written today will continue working without change in future JDK versions.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install the latest Java 17 (JDK 17) on Fedora 35 Workstation or Server.
Nmap, also known as Network Mapper, is a free, open-source tool network administrators use to scan for vulnerabilities within their network and network discovery.
Nmap allows finding devices running on their network and discovering open ports and services that, if not secure or hardened, can lead to potential hackers exploiting known vulnerabilities security risks.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install and basic use Nmap on Fedora 35 Workstation or Server.
ImageMagick is a free, open-source application installed as a binary distribution or source code. ImageMagick can convert, read, write and process raster images. ImageMagick is also available across all major platforms, including Android, BSD, Linux, Windows, Mac OSX, iOS, and many others.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install ImageMagick on Fedora 35 Workstation or Server using the DNF or Source installation method.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Grafana on Fedora 35. For those of you who didn’t know, Grafana is multi-platform open-source analytics and interactive visualization web application. Grafana provides charts, graphs, and alerts for the web when connected to supported data sources.
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 the Grafana open-source platform for visualization and monitoring on a Fedora 35.
There is a quick way to find all installed fonts in your Linux.
In this article we will use the fc-list command to list all fonts and styles on your Linux system.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to list the installed repositories in Linux.
We can find the list of all enabled or even disabled repositories using the distribution’s default package manager or using a third-party tool inix.
Pinta is a free and open-source program for image editing and drawing.
Pinta’s goal is to provide users with a simple tool to draw and edit images, it is available for Windows, Linux, mac, and BSD.
Hi Techies, one of the advantages of LVM partition is that it can be resized online without any downtime. Here resize means increasing and reducing lvm partition size. Though it is not recommended to reduce lvm partition as it may leads to data corruption.
In this post, we will demonstrate how to extend or increase LVM partition’s size in linux using lvextend command. For the demonstration, we have ‘/dev/vg01-lv01’ partition of size 10 GB and mounted on /data folder.
Here’s how to make sudo remember your password for longer so that you don’t have to keep typing it over and over.
Probably you execute quite a lot of sudo commands, because you don’t want to sudo su and execute commands as root all the time.
You noticed that if you execute one and then another one within few minutes, the 2nd time you don’t get the message like: [sudo] password for your_username. However, you do get it when there is more time between the execution of the two commands.
Openstack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is deployed as an infrastructure-as-service in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users.
I love how Ubuntu puts it “Imagine a data centre with hundreds of physical machines, racked, powered and connected to each other. One tool turns this data centre into a cloud and enables on-demand resource provisioning through a self-service portal. That’s OpenStack “.
MicroStack is a micro cloud platform based on OpenStack. It is designed for small scale data centre deployments. It eliminates the complexity behind OpenStack. MicroStack answers the need for edge computing, providing reliable and secure cloud platforms.
Are you running Debian 11 Bullseye on VMware? Then here are the commands to install VMware Open VM Tools on Debian 11 Virtual Machine.
After installing the Linux or Windows on Virtual Machine provided by Vmware Workstation, we need to set up VMware tools. It is because, by default, the Virtual machine will not be optimized to work with the host in parallel. This means VM will not adapt the screen resolution; copy-paste from host to guest, or vice versa including drag and drop of files will not be there. Although this might not be a valuable feature for users who are using command line Linux on Vmware VM but for GUI Desktop, these features are worth a lot.
Running PHP on a Linux web server is a prerequisite for the use of many popular applications such as Wordpress, Joomla and Drupal. Linux administrators and web developers must approach PHP with caution, as new vulnerabilities in poorly written and implemented PHP code are abundant and dangerous.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install InfluxDB on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, InfluxDB is a time-series platform with dashboards, queries, tasks, and agents all in one place. It is designed to handle high write and query loads. The InfluxDB Platform also includes APIs, tools, and an ecosystem that includes 10 client and server libraries, Telegraf plugins, visualization integrations with Grafana, Google Data Studio, and data sources integrations with Google Bigtable, BigQuery, and more.
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 the InfluxDB on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
Are you running Debian 11 Bullseye on VMware? Then here are the commands to install VMware Open VM Tools on Debian 11 Virtual Machine.
After installing the Linux or Windows on Virtual Machine provided by Vmware Workstation, we need to set up VMware tools. It is because, by default, the Virtual machine will not be optimized to work with the host in parallel. This means VM will not adapt the screen resolution; copy-paste from host to guest, or vice versa including drag and drop of files will not be there. Although this might not be a valuable feature for users who are using command line Linux on Vmware VM but for GUI Desktop, these features are worth a lot.
The Wine development release 7.0-rc4 is now available.
What's new in this release (see below for details): - Bug fixes only, we are in code freeze.
The source is available from the following locations:
https://dl.winehq.org/wine/source/7.0/wine-7.0-rc4.tar.xz http://mirrors.ibiblio.org/wine/source/7.0/wine-7.0-rc4.tar.xz
Binary packages for various distributions will be available from:
https://www.winehq.org/download
You will find documentation on https://www.winehq.org/documentation
You can also get the current source directly from the git repository. Check https://www.winehq.org/git for details.
Wine is available thanks to the work of many people. See the file AUTHORS in the distribution for the complete list.
It's coming a few days late due to New Year's, but Wine 7.0-rc4 is out as the latest weekly release candidate for this forthcoming yearly stable release. Wine 7.0 is the imminent feature update for this open-source software allowing Windows games/applications to run on Linux, macOS, and other platforms.
Being in a code freeze since early December, Wine 7.0-rc4 is just delivering bug fixes. There are 38 known bug fixes in this week's release.
Several months have passed since our monumental 2.5.0 release, and now the ScummVM Team is thrilled to announce the release of the bugfix release, 2.5.1 codenamed “Californium”*.
The most notable changes are: we added scalers in OpenGL mode (those AdvMame, HQ etc things), fixed several bugs in The Lost Files of Sherlock Holmes, made the sound for Sam & Max more accurate, improved graphics for some Macintosh SCUMM games, implemented more renderers for The Longest Journey, made many enhancements to Little Big Adventure and we fixed the dreaded bug on World of Xeen startup.
Can Ubuntu reclaim its gaming crown? Based on a new job opening added to its careers page, Canonical thinks so.
Ubuntu’s chief sponsor is recruiting a “Linux Desktop Gaming Product Manager” whose job will be to ”…make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming”.
“We work with partners in the silicon world to ensure the latest graphics drivers and tweaks are built-in for optimal frame rates and latency, as well as with partners in the gaming industry to ensure that mechanisms such as anti-cheat capabilities are available to ensure fairness and product availability,” the listing explains.
When Steam for Linux debuted in 2012 Ubuntu was Valve’s recommended Linux distro for gamers wanting to thumb-flex with Tux (indeed, at that time Ubuntu was the recommended distro for pretty much else too).
Canonical is looking to capitalize on the renewed interest around Linux gaming and the raised prospects thanks to Valve's Steam Play allowing a growing number of compelling Windows games becoming playable on Linux.
Canonical is now hiring for a new role of a Desktop Gaming Product Manager for Ubuntu. Canonical wants to "make Ubuntu the best Linux desktop for gaming. We work with partners in the silicon world to ensure the latest graphics drivers and tweaks are built-in for optimal frame rates and latency, as well as with partners in the gaming industry to ensure that mechanisms such as anti-cheat capabilities are available to ensure fairness and product availability."
Canonical's Desktop Gaming Product Manager will lead desktop graphics driver choices around Ubuntu, work on partnerships with GPU vendors and other IHVs/ISVs, convey the Ubuntu gaming story to users, and work on other engineering design and development tasks.
So here it is — but let me stress: these window effects are for fun. No-one is claiming that flame-quitting app windows is some sort of life hack. But if you’ve got a device that can handle the graphical excess, and they make you smile, why not, right? Have at them!
The very latest update to the “Burn My Windows” GNONE extension adds a new window closing effect: “T-Rex Attack”. This does exactly what you imagine it does...
Well known Solus Project core team member and Experience Lead Joshua Strobl has announced he is stepping down from the project but will be continuing his work on the Budgie desktop.
Strobl announced on New Year's Day that he is stepping down from this popular desktop-focused Linux distribution project. Since 2018 he has co-lead the distribution and became the main developer of the Budgie desktop environment but had been involved with Solus for nearly seven years.
I’m a Gentoo user who recently decided to try an alternative Linux (and binary based) operating system, something that would require no maintaining what so ever. I ended up choosing the most boring operating system that I could think of, which is Debian. And while it started out good, Debian would only last about two months on my computer.
The first annoyance I had with Debian was with Pulseaudio. When I changed the volume—using shortcuts on my keyboard in incremental steps of 5%—the sound would glitch for a second or two for each step. It wasn’t a deal-breaker, but it was somewhat annoying. My second issue was far more annoying though; every time I woke up my computer, the Internet connection would be completely gone. The only way I was able to get it back, was to either reboot my router or my computer.
I also had some minor annoyance, like how the boot process would completely hang without any message about why when it tried to mount a missing storage disk at boot. It took me a while before I figured out that it would continue to boot into some systemd rescue mode if I just waited for a few minutes. After that I was able to debug the issue and finally add the noauto argument to the disk in my filesystem table. While minor annoyances like this, aren’t any kind of deal-breaker for me, it can be a bit frustrating to deal with, when they stack up on top of each other.
I eventually decided to try upgrading to Debian testing, to see if that would solve any of the issues for me. It didn’t. In fact, it made everything worse. My graphical stack was now completely kaput. I don’t know what happened and I couldn’t figure out how to solve it either. On top of that, I happened to stumble upon the article “the sad state of web browser support currently within Debian”. I then decided that Debian wasn’t worth it on the desktop for me, and I simply gave up. I wiped everything and installed Arch Linux. It wasn’t one of my top choices, but it was something that I was familiar with.
The new release of CentOS is here and has brought in man changes many users have questioned about. I know many of you are considering an upgrade, but why? This CentOS 7 vs CentOS 8 comparison goes over points such as performance, updates and stability so you can choose the best.
As Red Hat Enterprise Linus (RHEL) is the upstream for this, it follows the same lifestyle that this dictates. All this means that its version 6 has reached the end of life (EOL) by the end of 2020 and version 7 by the end of 2024. RHEL’s 20-year life cycle makes version 8, which was released back in 2019, the current release till the year 2029. That is a lot of years. However, the newer released will be called “Stream” and it seems like it’s not going anywhere anytime soon.
A proposal for Fedora 36 is to implement Digest Lists Integrity Module "DIGLIM" functionality as an optional feature for effectively providing remote attestation and/or secure boot at the application level.
The DIGLIM feature proposal for Fedora is summed up as: "Digest Lists Integrity Module (DIGLIM) takes a different approach. It allows IMA to extend a PCR in a predictable way or to verify the authenticity of files by querying an in-kernel repository of authenticated reference values, built from information already available in existing packages (FILEDIGESTS section of the RPM header, with signature in the RSAHEADER section). Data source authentication does not require additional key management. With support for PGP keys in the kernel, the official Fedora PGP keys can be imported to the builtin keyring of the kernel and used to verify the PGP signature of the RPM headers...A modified kernel with the DIGLIM patches will expose to user space an interface to add/remove file digests from the kernel hash table. A user space parser, executed by the kernel during early boot, parses RPM headers found in /etc/diglim in the initial ram disk (included with a custom dracut script) and uploads them to the kernel. When a file is accessed, IMA calculates the file digest and queries it with DIGLIM. If the digest is found, measurement is skipped and appraisal is successful. If the digest is not found, a measurement of the file is performed and appraisal fails. When packages are installed or removed, the kernel hash table is kept synchronized with a new rpm plugin."
In December I was assigned 20 hours of work by Freexian's Debian LTS initiative. I worked 16 hours, and the remaining 4 hours cancelled out my over-work in November.
I completed an update to the linux (4.9) package and issued DLA 2843-1.
There are few which you might have heard about like Kubuntu, Xubuntu, Lubuntu, etc. These are not nicknames that users have given to their systems. Let us tell you the reason behind such different names.
There are different versions which are categorized according to their certain purpose or the desktop environment they use.
Now, when it comes to Linux, the user has the freedom to select your “desktop environment”. Now you might wonder what this is. It is a bundle of components which provide common GUI elements like icons, toolbars, wallpapers and other desktop widgets. Most of these have their own set of integrated apps as well as utilities so that the users get a uniform feel while using the Operating System.
This actually changes the look as well as the feel of the OS that you use, and at times programs as well.
Are you still confused? Well, let us you give you a rather loose analogy. This is like wearing clothes; if you dress like a hippie then you shall come across as like this. If you have similar hair, then there shall be a uniform feel of being one.
Now, what is the advantage to use one desktop environment over the other? In the last analogue with clothes, if you wear jeans which are skinny, you may look smart but you cannot run fast. There are compromises, you see.
Some of these focus on the use of graphics, but then for this, you need to have a better hardware configuration. On the other side, some of these run better with a system which have low configuration but might not look that good.
Do you need a microcontroller that runs at 1 GHz? No, probably not. But that didn’t stop [Visual Micro] from trying, and the results are pretty interesting. Not only did the plucky little chip not cook itself, it actually seemed to run fairly well; with the already powerful microcontroller getting a considerable boost in performance.
Readers not aware of what Ghidra is might imagine some kind of aftermarket water cooler firmware or mainboard – a usual hacker practice with reflow ovens. What [Robbe Derks} did is no less impressive and inspiring: A water cooler firmware mod that adds hands-free water dispensing, without requiring any hardware mods or writing an alternative firmware from scratch.
Having disassembled the cooler, [Robbe] found a PIC18F6527 on the mainboard, and surprisingly, it didn’t have firmware readback protection. Even lack of a PICkit didn’t stop him – he just used an Arduino to dump the firmware, with the dumper code shared for us to reuse, and the resulting dumps available in the same repository.
The Internet of Things (IoT) is a fascinating development in the realm of computing. Connected smart devices, home automation, and related areas of development are producing many interesting projects. Opensource.com's writers shared their expertise about a variety of Internet of Things projects many times during 2021. Here are Opensource.com's ten best Internet of Things articles from the year.
A year ago I posted Glean in 2021 as a way to look into the future and set out a vision and plan for the project. Today I'm looking back at 2021, if we were able to follow up on my plans back then and look at all the other things we did for Glean.
Let's start easy: According to the index we wrote 21 This Week in Glean blog posts (including this one). Close enough to one every other week. Communicating about our work is important and TWiGs are one way to put our ideas and thoughts about the project out there.
We have just newly released Foreign Data Wrapper for databases with JDBC interface.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 13 and 14.
This FDW is implemented in C language with JDK library.
The existing JDBC FDWs are not well maintained and their features are very limited, this jdbc_fdw is released in order to solve these problems.
We have just released version 0.2.1 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for Parquet file on Amazon S3.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 13 and 14.
have just released version 1.1.0 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for DynamoDB.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 13 and 14.
We have just released version 2.1.1 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for GridDB.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
pg_query_rewrite is a PostgreSQL extension that can modify SQL statements received by PostgreSQL before the backend executes them. This tries to be similar to the Rewriter Query Rewrite Plugin in MySQL.
We have just released version 2.1.1 of the Foreign Data Wrapper for SQLite.
This release can work with PostgreSQL 10, 11, 12, 13 and 14.
release notes:
We welcome Bruno Haible to the THANKS file.
README excerpt:
GNU Alive is a keep-alive program for internet connections. It repeatedly pings a series of user-specified hosts, thereby encouraging (one hopes) the involved networks to not disappear.
NEWS for 2.0.5 (2022-01-02):
- ‘--help’ output says GNU Alive takes no arguments
It also says details are in the manual.
- missing xdgdirs(1) now silent
Previously, when looking for the config directory, if xdgdirs(1) was not found, you would see the (harmless) error message:
/bin/sh: 1: xdgdirs: not found
Now, it's searched for prior to invocation, so if it's missing, there is no error message.
- bootstrap/maintenance tools
upgraded:
(none)
as before:
GNU texinfo 6.8 GNU Automake 1.16.5 GNU Autoconf 2.71 GNU Guile 2.2.7 Guile-BAUX 20211208.0839.a5245e7 GNU gnulib 2021-12-10 21:54:54
tarball and detached signature:
https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/alive/alive-2.0.5.tar.lz https://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/alive/alive-2.0.5.tar.lz.sig
source code:
https://git.savannah.gnu.org/cgit/alive.git?h=p
homepage:
https://www.gnu.org/software/alive/
GNU rush version 2.2 is available for download.
Libreboot intentionally de-blobs coreboot, which is to say that in does not include binary blobs. It is a distribution of entirely Free Software and, as such, only supports a handful of machines from coreboot, which otherwise requires binary blobs on most systems. Libreboot’s version of coreboot is entirely free, on all supported mainboards.
Libreboot is designed to comply with the Free Software Foundation’s Respects Your Freedom criteria and the GNU Free System Distribution Guidelines (GNU FSDG), ensuring that it is entirely Free Software.
Dear zh-cn-translators: Thank you all for the help in 2021. Here comes the summary of www.gnu.org translation from GNU. Please take your time to read. We are doing almost as good as 2020. Dear GNU translators! This year, the total number of new translations was approximately like in 2020, but their mean size was almost twice as large. Nearly every third new translation was made in the Brazilian Portuguese team; the Albanian and ("Traditional") Chinese teams made four times more translations than in 2020. General Statistics In October, we reached new maximum values of translations per file in important directories, 9.32 translations per file (0.4 more than in 2020) and 8.39 translations weighted with size of articles (0.15 more than in 2020). The percent of outdated translations was considerably higher than in 2020, mostly due to more commits this year. The table below shows the number and size of newly translated articles in important directories (as of 2021-12-31) and typical number of outdated GNUNified translations throughout the year.
Most webpages aren’t written in your native language; despite the entire web being available to you in your language. However, many web surfers don’t seem to realize that they’re reading machine-translated pages instead of the originals.
Over the years, I’ve received hundreds of complaints in foreign languages about the poor quality of my writing in their respective languages. Except, I’ve never written a word in their language. I often can’t even identify the language without running it through a translation service!
I also see this anecdotal evidence of this all over the web. There’s always that one person in a discussion forum, open-source project, article comments, and social media thread that comments in a different language to everyone else. It’s nothing but a small faux pas, but one that might not be the commenter’s fault.
When you’re into woodworking in a serious way, you’re going to eventually want some power tools. With such efficiency of operation, things can go pear-shaped quickly, with wood dust getting absolutely everywhere. It’s not always practical (or desirable) to work outdoors, and many of us only have small workshops to do our making in. But woodworking tools eat space quickly. Centralized extraction is one solution, but all that fixed rigid ducting forces one to fix the tool locations, which isn’t always a good thing. Moveable tool carts are nothing new, we’ve seen many solutions over the years, but this build by [Peter Waldraff] is rather slick (video embedded below,) includes some really nice features in a very compact — and critically — moveable format.
[Frank Herrmann] had an interesting idea to turn a geared DC motor into a servo motor assembly, but with a stepper motor-like interface. By stacking some small PCBs behind the motor body, it was possible to squeeze a DRV8837 DC motor driver and a pair of hall effect sensors on the first PCB layer, with the magnetic encoder nestled tightly behind it. Pin headers at the edge of the PCB connect to a second PCB bearing the microcontroller, which is based on the cheap STM32L432. The second PCB also holds an associated LDO and debug LED. Together, this handful of parts provide all that is needed to read the encoder, control the motor rotation and listen on the ‘stepper motor driver’ interface pins hooked up to the motion controller upstream. The Arduino source for this can be found on the project GitHub.
Whilst [Frank] mentions that this assembly has a weight and torque advantage over a NEMA 17 sized stepper motor, but we see no hard data on accuracy and repeatability which would be important for precise operations like 3D printing.
While there’s always the edge case, there’s a strong likelihood that if you’re using OpenSCAD, you’re probably working on a CAD model that you intend to 3D print at some point. Of course that’s not to say this is all you can do in OpenSCAD, but it’s arguably what it does best. If you wanted to make artistic models, or maybe render what your new kitchen will look like, there are other tools better suited to such tasks.
But thanks to lasercut.scad, a library that [Brendan Sleight] has been working on for the last several years, we might have to reconsider our preconceived dimensional notions. Instead of designing parts for 3D printing, his library is all about creating parts intended for subtractive manufacturing. Originally (as the name implies) it was geared towards laser cutting, but the project has since evolved to support CNC routers, vinyl cutters, and pretty much anything else that can follow a DXF file.
If the workings of a mechanical timepiece give you a thrill, prepare to be blown away by this over-the-top astronomical clock.
The horological masterpiece, which was designed by [Mark Frank] as his “dream clock”, is a riot of brass, bronze, and steel — 1,200 pounds (544 kg) of it, in fact, at least in the raw materials pile. Work on the timepiece began in 2006, with a full-scale mockup executed in wood by Buchannan of Chelmsford, the Australian fabricator that [Mark] commissioned to make his design a reality. We have a hard time explaining the design, which has just about every horological trick incorporated into it.
[Mark] describes the clock as “a four train, quarter striking movement with the fourth train driving the astronomical systems,” which sounds far simpler than the finished product is. It includes 52 “complications,” including a 400-year perpetual calendar, tide clock, solar and lunar eclipse prediction, a planisphere to show the constellations, and even a thermometer. And, as if those weren’t enough, the clock sports both a tellurion to keep track of the Sun-Earth-Moon system and a full orrery out to the orbit of Saturn, including all the major moons. The video below shows the only recently finished masterpiece in operation.
Across Europe, records for new coronavirus infections are being set day after day, as the Omicron variant tears through populations with a swiftness outpacing anything witnessed over the past two years of the pandemic.
Like the United States, which recorded a new high in daily cases on Tuesday, European nations are struggling against an onslaught of infections from a virus that shows no sign of going away. Driven, health officials suspect, by the Omicron variant, Britain, Denmark, France, Greece, Italy and Spain all set records for new daily case counts this week.
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“Delta and Omicron are now twin threats driving up cases to record numbers, leading to spikes in hospitalization and deaths,” Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, the W.H.O.’s director general, said at a news conference in Geneva. “I am highly concerned that Omicron, being highly transmissible and spreading at the same time as Delta, is leading to a tsunami of cases.”
In England and Northern Ireland on Wednesday, there were no P.C.R. test appointments available to book online, and around midday, many people reported that none were available to order online through the British government’s health services.
Leyla Hannbeck, the chief executive of the Association of Independent Multiple Pharmacies, a British organization representing community pharmacies, said the uptick in cases and a recent shift on government guidelines around testing has led to a surge in demand for rapid lateral-flow tests.
“We have people coming in every two to five minutes asking for lateral-flow testing,” she said. “And we don’t know when it’s going to arrive back in stock, and it’s completely out of our control.”
Coincidentally(?) it was after the second Coronavirus vaccine (Pfizer) and I don’t know if the two are related, but I’d never had it shoot that high before. On a bad day, I’d be in pre-hypertension and on most days it would be on the high end of normal. But in March I started having blood pressure running so high I could feel it in my eyeballs. When I checked, it was running at 147/99, and in about that range. Not good! But since you’re not going to have a stroke in the next five minutes, good luck getting any medical care in America.
You can almost fill a book with things that doctors either don’t know or won’t tell you, so when I visited the doctor, I was told “No, we’re not putting you on meds and if you really want to get it down, go on a DASH diet and get rid of most of your dietary salt.”.
So, obviously, I like to eat. Who doesn’t? But after three days using the American Heart Association’s slow cooker DASH diet, I could tell that there’s really no making up for salt in your cooking in a lot of places. You can reduce the salt, and honestly in many recipes you should seek out reduced sodium options such as reduced sodium chicken broth (the tetrapak, not the can!) or reduced sodium ketchup, or using coconut aminos instead of soy sauce (or if you can’t afford coconut aminos, at least use reduced sodium soy sauce), and obviously if the recipe calls for salt, you can use Morton Lite Salt (half potassium chloride and half sodium chloride) or just omit it entirely or use less if some other ingredients are really salty already.
Josh and Kurt talk about the question will we ever fix all the vulnerabilities? The question came from Reddit and is very reasonable, but it turns out this is REALLY hard to discuss. The answer is of course “no”, but why it is no is very complicated. Far more complicated than either of us thought it would be.
With the first post of 2022, I'd like to follow up on one of last year's most important court rulings: Epic Games v. Apple. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, Epic's opening brief on appeal is due later this month, and I strongly doubt that Epic can turn things around without a single-brand market definition. I'll go into more detail on that part in the coming days, subject to whatever else will happen, such as a potential new round of Ericsson v. Apple patent infringement litigation.
2021 was the year in which Apple turned out to be the (new) Evil Empire. Its abuse of market power was no secret in tech industry circles even five years ago, but for a long time Apple managed to play the media--until too much bad stuff came out, all the way up to Apple's prioritization of lock-in over customer benefits, not least as a result of Epic v. Apple (though Epic underperformed in other respects). It's not like consumers realize this to a degree that would impact Apple's sales--also because the alternative would be Android, and it's not like Google is that much better (though it is the lesser evil).
In a few weeks' time, Epic Games will file its opening brief with the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, trying to turn around a litigation in which Apple undoubtedly won the first round. I expect to focus very much on patent litigation in the coming weeks (there may already be some interesting filings targeting Apple tomorrow), but I would like to share some thoughts ahead of Epic's brief, given the importance of that case to app developers like me.
I've read the 185-page decision three times. The first time--right after it came down in September--I was thoroughly disappointed and suspected (but this view has changed!) the judge of simply hedging her bets for an appeal. By finding for Apple on almost all counts (especially on 100% of those that really mattered), while handing Epic a consolation prize under state competition law, she's highly unlikely to be reversed across the board, as the appellate outcome will most likely be binary. Finding for Apple makes a reversal of the key parts much less likely than if she had sided with Epic, but even if it happened, it wouldn't be as bad as if she had acquitted Apple 100%: she would just come across as having erred on the side of caution. Conversely, if the most important parts are affirmed and the appeals court determines that the state UCL part cannot fare better than the Sherman Act claims, it's only a narrow (contrary to disinformation by some people) injunction that goes down the tubes.
There was something she said early on--at the preliminary injunction stage--that suggested to me she was going to optimize the decision for the inevitable appeal. She wanted the parties to agree to a jury trial (which Apple was seeking on its counterclaims) rather than a bench trial, and she said that the appeals court doesn't really afford much deference to factual findings by the lower courts. That was a clear allusion to FTC v. Qualcomm--and while Judge Lucy Koh decided in that case what she thought was right based on the evidence (by now she's on the appeals court, which I'm very happy about), Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ("YGR") really would have preferred to let a jury decide, as appeals courts don't overturn jury verdicts as easily as judicial findings.
The evaluation is the penultimate step in the revision of the GI system in the EU. The idea to revise the GI rules was first expressed in the Commission’s Farm to Fork Strategy in May 2020, and later included in the Commission’s Action Plan on Intellectual Property. According to the Action Plan, the revision aims at strengthening the protection system for agricultural products. In parallel, the European Commission is also considering whether to expand EU-wide GI protection to non-agricultural products [check a dedicated web-page with all the studies conducted by the Commission in this regard].
As part of the preparatory analysis, the Commission undertook the evaluation of existing norms to see whether the EU’s GI policy had achieved its objectives. The evaluation covered the period from May 2008 (when the last evaluation was conducted) to the end of 2020. The analysis builds upon several sources of data, such as external economic studies and the public consultation recently conducted by the Commission (though the document acknowledges the low response rate of the public consultation).
The EU GI system is evaluated on the basis of five criteria: relevance, effectiveness, efficiency, coherence, and EU-added value. Expectedly, the evaluation concludes that the EU GI system fulfils all these five criteria (though certain improvements are suggested).
Under art. 7 (1) of Directive 98/71/EC (and equivalent art. 8(1) of Regulation 6/2002), “a design right shall not subsist in features of appearance of a product which are solely dictated by its technical function.” Recital 14 of the Directive (often relied upon by the Court of Justice) further explains that technological innovation should not be hampered by granting design protection to features dictated solely by a technical function. The most problematic part of this principle is knowing which feature shall be considered as “solely dictated by a technical function”.
Various EU Member States have had a similar provision in their national legislation well before Directive 98/71/EC was enacted. In that context, two approaches to the principle were developed: the “multiplicity of forms” theory and the “causality (or causative)” theory.
Under the “multiplicity of forms” theory, if the technical function can be achieved through the use of another, alternative form, the choice of a particular feature of the design was not determined solely by its technical function. As explained by the Advocate General in C-395/16, the “range of [alternative] forms shows that in such a case the product’s designer was not constrained by the function, but was free to opt for any one of those forms when developing the design”.
The number of patents granted in Germany for inventions related to urban air mobility increased significantly in 2020, the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA) said on Wednesday.
Including filings with the European Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), 583 patents were published for air taxis in Germany, 29 percent more than in 2019, the DPMA said.
Kringle Pharma, Inc. (Head office located in Ibaraki, Osaka; President & CEO, Kiichi Adachi; "KRINGLE"), a late clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company, today announces that the European Patent Office has issued patent No. EP3192524, entitled "HGF PREPARATION SUITABLE FOR TREATMENT OF NERVOUS DESEASES". This patent covers proprietary formulations of drug product containing recombinant human hepatocyte growth factor (HGF). A drug product based on the patented formulation has been used in the ongoing clinical studies including Phase 3 in acute spinal cord injury and Phase 2 in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Besides, Phase 1/2 study in vocal fold scar was successfully completed with the same investigational drug to be administered locally in the vocal cords (Hirano et al., J Tissue Eng Regen Med. 2018; 12(4):1031-1038). Therefore, the patented drug formulation can be utilized not only for neuronal diseases but also other incurable diseases such as vocal fold scar, being the basis of expanding the target indications for HGF treatment. This patent was already granted in the U.S., Japan, Canada and Korea, further strengthening the Kringle's intellectual property position globally.
While the Federal Circuit has patent law as its principal focus, as a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, questions come before the Court on more mundane, procedural matters (which, sometimes being dispositive, does not reduce their importance to the parties and occasionally the rest of us). One such case was decided on December 16th in Alpek Polyester, S.A. v. Polymetrix AG (complicated, as should be evident from the caption, by involving non-US. parties and having putatively infringing activities arising both here and abroad).
The case arose over Polymetrix's asserted infringement of U.S. Patent Nos. 7,790,840, 7,868,125, and 7,192,545 owned by Alpek (a Mexican company) and exclusively licensed to co-Plaintiff DAK Americas LLC (a U.S. company), the patent claim being directed to methods for producing polyethylene terephthalate (PET) resins; because the matters on appeal were exclusively procedural there was no need in the opinion (or here) to delve into the scope of the claims any further. Defendant Polymetrix is a Swiss company in the business of supplying equipment and engineering services for constructing plants for making PET resin (while not making the resin itself, i.e., it provides the means but not the product and thus did not itself practice the claimed methods).
[...]
Regarding Alpek's second argument, the Federal Circuit did not see any genuine issue of material fact on the evidence, which the Court considered to be supported only with "a conclusory assertion by [Alpek's] expert." According to the opinion, the "overwhelming majority of the evidence" supported a finding that AlphaPet was not the source of the data relied upon by Polymetrix with regard to the performance of the Polish plant (including agreement with the District Court that Alpek blundered when it asserted that this data "match[ed] up almost exactly," the opinion stating that "If the AlphaPet test results were really the source of the data for Polymetrix's report, we can discern no reason why the two sets of data would not match up exactly" (emphases in opinion).
As for Alpek's third argument, the Federal Circuit agreed with the District Court that the details of Swedish contract law, asserted to support Alpek's contention that under that law Polymetrix was responsible for the activities in the Polish plant, were "inapposite." "As a matter of American law," according to the opinion, 'the mere fact that Polymetrix owned the plant equipment is wholly insufficient for Alpek to meet its burden of proving that Polymetrix took active steps to induce IVP to infringe," citing MGM Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 935–36 (2005), in support for this principle.
Finally, the Court rejected Alpek's fourth argument, based in part on the breadth of the District Court's discretion on discovery matters and enforcement of the Civil Procedure rules. The Federal Circuit saw none of the surprise or prejudice the Rule was intended to prevent, in view of the "more than 1,000 documents produced during discovery" bearing the witness's name.
A person of ordinary skill in the art could not determine the effective dose of the active ingredient in Tecfidera from the original patent specification.
A West Virginia federal district court’s decision that certain claims of a Biogen patent directed to the multiple sclerosis treatment drug Tecfidera were invalid for lack of written description support was not clearly erroneous, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has held. The original specification did not give a person of ordinary skill in the art any reason to believe that the particular dosage of dimethyl fumarate claimed was effective. Circuit Judge O’Malley filed a dissenting opinion (Biogen International GmbH v. Mylan Pharmaceuticals Inc., November 30, 2021, Reyna, J.).
Christmas came early at EXACT Therapeutics AS (“EXACT-Tx”, or “the Company” Euronext Growth: EXTX) as the clinical-stage precision health company developing the proprietary ultrasound-mediated drug delivery platform Acoustic Cluster Therapy (ACT€®) for use across multiple diseases, announces today that allowability has been found for its patent application in Europe (publication no. EP3049117) for its innovative Acoustic Cluster Therapy€® technology.
New German legislation, a leap forward on the UPC and important SEP-related initiatives from the UK and the Commission were among the patent highlights of 2021 in Europe.
This is a quick follow-up to Monday's post on InterDigital v. OPPO:
I have been able to obtain the basic information that InterDigital has filed two complaints with the Landgericht München I (Munich I Regional Court) and one with the Landgericht Mannheim (Mannheim Regional Court). It is, however, difficult to obtain further information right now. In principle, the courts are operational, but many judges and their staff are on vacation. Also, I have not been able to find out more about InterDigital's filings in the UK and India yet.
InterDigital won a landmark anti-anti-anti-antisuit injunction ("A4SI") in Munich against Xiaomi earlier this year. Munich is now the #1 patent enforcement venue outside the United States, particularly when it comes to cases in which smartphones and connected vehicles are the accused products. The only potential risk factor is the appointment of a "dark horse" in the patent infringement context, Judge Lars Meinhardt, who will preside over the Munich appeals court's patent-specialized senate.
Mannheim continues to be very popular as well, as InterDigital's new complaint there shows--and from time to time there are interesting developments in Dusseldorf, such as a recent decision relating to standard-essential patent pools in favor of a defendant-counterclaimant (Turkish electronics maker Vestel) that I have yet to obtain a copy of so I can analyze and comment on it.
The following comes from Chief Justice John Roberts’ end-of-year Report on the Federal Judiciary for 2021.
Lots of the new learning in patent law over the past decade has focused on patent eligibility. But, none of the eligibility cases (new or old) show up in my list of the most cited Supreme Court cases.
Olaf Sööt Design’s pending petition for certiorari centers on the age-old division between issues-of-fact and issues-of-law. The U.S. Constitution generally requires due process, and particularly protects litigants’ rights to a jury trial in common law cases. One quirk–the right to a trial by jury does not cover issues-of-law, and only extends to some issues-of-fact.
Amendments to a patent application form an essential element in demarcating the scope of inventions. In India, claim amendments are governed by Sections 57 to 59 of the Patents Act, 1970 (hereinafter referred to as the ‘Act’).
This article provides a comprehensive guide on the scope of claim amendments allowed in the Indian Patent regime. It focuses on the relevant aspects which must be kept in mind when applicants/patentees wish to file claim amendments. The article also highlights the trends at the Indian Patent Office (IPO) in examining the claim amendments.
Following a telephone conference held on August 16th (a transcript of which can be found here) between the Board and representatives of Junior Party the University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (collectively, "CVC") and Senior Party Sigma-Aldrich, the Board issued its Order on September 20th authorizing motions and setting times under 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 104(c) and 121.
As it had in its Order setting motions and times in related Interference No. 106,133 between Sigma-Aldrich and Junior Party the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT, the Order begins with the Board's rejection of any of these motions being "threshold" motions (as the parties had argued), stating that "[p]atentability over the prior art is not now, and never has been, a 'threshold issue.'" Further, the Board stated that "a holding during the course of interference that a party's claims are unpatentable over prior art does not necessarily deprive that party of standing on the central issue of an interference—priority," citing 37 C.F.R. €§ 41.201, noting that a party in an interference having claims deemed unpatentable "may still have a basis to show the opponent is not entitled to a patent because the opponent was not the first to invent the interfering subject matter." This raises the possibility that the outcome of an interference may be that neither party is entitled to a patent on claims falling within the scope of the Interference Count.
Earlier today, the Federal Circuit affirmed the final determination by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Patent Trial and Appeal Board finding claims 1, 2, and 4-14 of U.S. Patent No. 8,409,862 unpatentable as either anticipated or obvious.
The '862 patent is directed to using mass spectrometry to detect low levels of testosterone in female humans. The '862 patent explains that while testosterone levels are much lower in females as compared to males, testosterone can be purified prior to mass spectrometry, which can improve the limit of detection. Claims 8 and 9, which were relevant to the appeal, require the detection of testosterone at concentrations of less than 5 ng/dL or less than 1 ng/dL in the sample, respectively.
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With regard to the Board's finding of obviousness with respect to claims 8 and 9, Quest argued that there was no motivation to modify Clarke to increase sensitivity, that there was no reasonable expectation of success in doing so, and that there was a documented failure of others. The Federal Circuit first found that substantial evidence supported the Board's conclusion that there was a motivation to improve the sensitivity of methods measuring testosterone. Quest had specifically argued that 5 ng/dL and 1 ng/dL of testosterone are below the clinically relevant range of testosterone, but the Court was unpersuaded that this would have discouraged the development of more sensitive methods. The Court next found that substantial evidence supported the Board's finding that a skilled artisan would have had a reasonable expectation of success of achieving a lower level of detection, noting that the Board had recognized a number of parameters, including increasing the sample volume, that a skilled artisan could have modified to reach 5 ng/dL or 1 ng/dL detection. Finally, the Court was unpersuaded by Quest's argument that Kushnir et al., 52(1) CLIN. CHEM. 120–28 (2006), demonstrated a failure of others to reach detection levels of 5 ng/dL or 1 ng/dL without derivatizing testosterone. "Given the deferential standard of review, as well as the differences in Kushnir's detection method relative to the claims at issue," the Board "decline[d] to say that the Board erred in determining that Kushnir fails to establish nonobviousness." The Federal Circuit therefore found that substantial evidence supported the facts underlying the Board's conclusion that claims 8 and 9 would have been obvious in view of Clarke.
Finding that substantial evidence supported both of the Board's findings that were challenged by Quest, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Board's finding that claims 1, 2, and 4–14 of the '862 patent were unpatentable as either obvious or anticipated.
Following a telephone conference held on August 16th (a transcript of which can be found here) between the Board and representatives of Junior Party the Broad Institute, Harvard University, and MIT (collectively, Broad) and Senior Party Sigma-Aldrich, the Board issued its Order on September 20th authorizing motions and setting times under 37 C.F.R. ۤۤ 104(c) and 121.
The Order begins with the Board's rejection of any of these motions being "threshold" motions (as the parties had argued), stating that "[p]atentability over the prior art is not now, and never has been, a 'threshold issue.'" Further, the Board stated that "a holding during the course of interference that a party's claims are unpatentable over prior art does not necessarily deprive that party of standing on the central issue of an interference—priority," citing 37 C.F.R. €§ 41.201, noting that a party in an interference having claims deemed unpatentable "may still have a basis to show the opponent is not entitled to a patent because the opponent was not the first to invent the interfering subject matter." This raises the possibility that the outcome of an interference may be that neither party is entitled to a patent on claims falling within the scope of the Interference Count.
There undeniably is a problem to be solved when one United States District Judge--Judge Alan Albright--gets about 20% of all U.S. patent infringement complaints. With the greatest respect for his admittedly tremendous expertise in patent litigation and his ability to work both smart and hard, it's mind-boggling when you consider that there are roundabout 700 U.S. district judgeships, and every district judge can hear patent cases (unlike in jurisdictions where patent complaints may be brought only before specialized divisions of particular courts).
Apart from his reluctance to transfer cases out of his district (and his division, unless he gets to preside over them anyway), and some other positions that patentees love him for, he may actually be much more balanced than people think. For example, he has recently invalidated patents on Alice abstraction (ۤ 101) grounds in a Facebook case and some other case. There was a fracking case last year in which I acknowledged he had a point. I listened in to a VLSI v. Intel trial, at the end of which Intel was cleared of infringement last summer, and saw no indication of pro-patentee bias. Let's put it this way: I keep watching developments in that district, but I try hard not to be intellectually dishonest when I voice criticism.
There are some cases where the Federal Circuit makes its decision based on the eternal verities of patent law (insofar as there are any eternal verities in patent law). One such decision arose earlier this month when the Federal Circuit affirmed a determination of non-obviousness by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board in an inter partes review proceeding, that opinion captioned Teva Pharmaceuticals USA, Inc. v. Corcept Therapeutics, Inc.
The case arose incident to ANDA litigation between the parties involving Corcept's Korlym product comprising the active pharmaceutical ingredient mifepristone for treating Cushing's Syndrome. The drug had been recognized since the 1980's as an antiprogestin compound, but its relevant effect in vivo turned out to be as a glucocorticoid reception antagonist, which suggested its use against Cushing's (which was known to be caused by excessive levels of cortisol). Corcept obtained FDA approval for the drug contingent on its performance of a post-marketing study under the provisions of 21 U.S.C. ۤ 355(o)(3), one of which was to conduct "[a] drug-drug interaction clinical trial to determine a quantitative estimate of the change in exposure of mifepristone following co-administration of ketoconazole (a strong CYP3A4 inhibitor)." The agency provided a description of the basis for this study, which included information such as ignorance in the art regarding the "degree of change" in exposure to mifepristone in the presence of drugs like ketoconazole and the potential safety risk that could arise. Important to the issues before the Court was Korlym's approved label, which recommended a starting dose of 300 mg/day that could be increased in increments to 1200 mg/day, and a caveat that administration of the drug should be limited to 300 ng/day in the presence of strong CYP3A inhibitors.
The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international agreement under the Paris Convention to promote international cooperation in the field of patents. The PCT is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and has over 150 member states around the world. A PCT application is not an 'international patent' application as such, but it allows applicants to file a single patent application and seek protection in any of the member states. The PCT system does not grant patents of its own authority, however. After an initial search and examination procedure, the application is passed to the national offices of the member states in which protection is sought, where it is treated as a national application in that member state and fully examined, leading to potential grant.
The PCT procedure can be split into two phases – the International Phase, and the National Phase. The International Phase begins with the filing of the PCT application and ends at the beginning of the National Phase when the application is passed to the national offices of each member state in which patent protection is required.
The key milestones in the PCT application procedure are: Filing, International Search, International Publication, Supplementary International Search (optional), International Preliminary Examination (optional), and National Phase Entry.
Patents will to a great extent continue as before - patents covering the UK will continue to be granted both by the UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) and the European Patent Office (EPO). Applications for patents can be filed directly with the UKIPO or EPO, or can be made pursuant to an international patent application filed under the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Neither the UKIPO, nor the EPO, is an EU institution and their operation will be unaffected by Brexit.
This year saw a raft of patent filings from industry heavyweights, including L’Oréal, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive and Estée Lauder. Here, CosmeticsDesign-Europe rounds up our coverage of this year’s patent-worthy innovations. A deep dive into the international patent filings of the beauty and personal care world certainly provides a nod to what’s ahead, revealing research and development priorities and signalling categories and trends set to flourish.
In this round-up piece, CosmeticsDesign-Europe looks back at our coverage on patents filed in 2021, and highlights some key areas industry is investing time and science in.
J A Kemp will be offering a webinar entitled "User Interfaces -- What Can You Patent?" on January 25, 2022 from 4:00 pm to 5:00 pm (GMT). Dominic Forsthye and Callum Docherty of J A Kemp will look at the EPO's approach to excluded matter as applied to user interfaces, using examples from case law to try to make sense of what can and cannot be patented at the EPO, and will discuss practical tips for drafting and prosecuting UI applications at the EPO to increase chances of success. The webinar will address the following topics...
Patents are granted at the European Patent Office (EPO) for inventions in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application, Art. 52(1) EPC.
Patents are in particular not granted for claims that relate to mathematical methods, methods for performing mental acts or programs for computers (software) if claimed as such, Art. 52(2) and (3) EPC. However, many fields of commercial interest rely on computer simulations, i.e. on mathematical models imitating real-world processes being implemented via software code on computers. For example, in the automotive field, computer simulations may help to provide models for engines, powertrains or whole automobiles. In the field of e-commerce, simulation of clothing, glasses or even cosmetics on a user’s avatar (“virtual try-on”) has become subject to a considerable number of patent applications world-wide and in particular at the EPO.
In light of the release of the latest movie in the series, Merpel wonders whether the James Bond theme is too long to be registered as a sound mark. This question was addressed in a decision issued early this year by the Fifth Board of Appeal (BoA) of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO).
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Danjaq further referred to the third draft of the CP11 (released in June 2020) that observed that “as sounds are increasingly being used in trade as part of a branding strategy, consumers are also more likely to perceive them as indications of commercial origin”. [The quoted wording is included in the final version of the CP11].
In addition, the applicant maintained that for the analysis of the consumer perception, the CP11 groups sound marks in the following categories: 1) sounds produced by or connected to the goods or services; 2) notes, combination of notes, tunes or melodies; and 3) sounds which are the audible equivalent of verbal elements. [The categories are also included in the final version of the CP11].
The applicant argued that the sign at issue fell under the second category because it is “a sequence of notes and thus, a melody or tune … [.] It has no direct relation to the goods and thus, there is no reason which would make it difficult to perceive the sound mark as badge of commercial origin … [and in consequence, n]o higher threshold is justified in the context of Article 7(1)(b) EUTMR”.
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The BoA’s decision is in line with the CP11 Common Practice on the required degree of distinctiveness of sound marks, as the sign at issue (a melody) has a resonance and is capable of being perceived by the relevant public as an indication of commercial origin.
The CP11 results from consultations and contributions from different stakeholders, including “the collaboration of the working group, composed of experts from national IP offices of the EU, the EUIPO and user associations”. It aims to serve as a reference document for Intellectual Property Offices and users alike, increasing the legal certainty by providing guidance on the examination of formal requirements and grounds for refusal of new types of trademarks (sound, motion, multimedia, and hologram marks) in light of the EU Trademark Reform that eliminated the requirement of the graphical representation.
On 3rd November 2010, Monster applied to register MONSTER as an EU trade mark for “Coffee based beverages and coffee based beverages containing milk in Class 30” and “Non-alcoholic beverages, namely energy drinks and energy drinks flavoured with coffee, all enhanced with vitamins, minerals, nutrients, amino acids and/or herbs in Class 32”.
On 5th November 2010, Monster filed another application, to register MONSTER ENERGY as an EU trade mark for “Coffee based beverages and coffee based beverages containing milk in Class 30”. Both marks registered on 19th April 2011.
On 25th April 2017, Frito-Lay applied to revoke both of Monster’s registrations on the ground that the marks had not been put to genuine use within a continuous period of five years. The applications for revocation concerned all the goods in Class 30 (‘the contested goods’). As such, Frito-Lay sought partial revocation of the MONSTER registration and full revocation of the MONSTER ENERGY registration.
On 2nd and 23rd October 2019, the EU IPO’s Cancellation Division revoked the marks in respect of the contested goods, finding that use of the marks had only been proven in respect of energy drinks. Monster appealed, but on 5th October 2020, the BoA dismissed both appeals.
The BoA held that: (1) it was necessary to distinguish between ‘coffee based beverages’ in Class 30 and ‘energy drinks’ in Class 32; (2) the ingredients of the ‘x-presso monster’ goods (which were the goods referred to in Monster’s evidence) had the same characteristics as ‘energy drinks’; (3) the real function or purpose of the ‘x-presso monster’ goods was to serve as ‘energy drinks’; and (4) the MONSTER ENERGY mark had not been used on the ‘x-presso monster’ goods.
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This case demonstrates that the Nice Agreement is not just an administrative tool, but that it can also play an important role in guiding the court’s assessment regarding non-use. Whilst Monster’s goods contained coffee, this was simply not enough to constitute genuine use of Class 30. Also interesting is the detail in which both the BoA and GC were prepared to scrutinise the properties of the relevant goods to circumvent Monster’s arguments.
Lastly, this case re-emphasises the importance of using a trade mark as registered. To paraphrase the iconic television police detective, Columbo, "that is where Monster made its mistake."
Lawyers say German brands that have tweaked their slogans as part of a COVID vaccination drive are demonstrating the distinctiveness of their marks
The impacts of the pandemic have been far-reaching and trademarks have not been immune. Despite reporting an initial dip in filings early this year, the World Intellectual Property Organization revealed in November that that the COVID-19 pandemic has not stopped companies – including those in the fashion, sportswear, and luxury industries – from offering up new goods and services, and seeking out corresponding trademark registrations (and creating new trademark trends) along the way. Growth in the number of filings amid the pandemic “shows how enterprises across the globe have brought new products and services to the market,” WIPO Director General Daren Tang said last month, noting that “enterprises are finding opportunities to reach customers in new ways and open up new markets.”
The USPTO refused to register the mark KINETIXX for "hockey sticks, hockey stick shafts and hockey stick blades," finding confusion likely with the mark shown below, registered for "Baseball gloves, batting gloves, bowling gloves, boxing gloves, fencing gloves, field hockey gloves, football gloves, archery gloves, golf gloves, goalkeepers gloves, weight lifting gloves, windsurfing gloves, workout gloves." Applicant contended that the registrant 'made a conscious decision to not list hockey gloves as part of its goods," and furthermore that the cited mark is distinguishable because of the dominant red X. How do you think this came out? In re Kinetixx Golf, LLC, Serial No. 87671054 (December 15, 2021) [not precedential] (Opinion by Judge Peter W. Cataldo).
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Applicant argued that this case is similar to In re Covalinski, 113 USPQ2d 1166 (TTAB 2014) (holding confusion unlikely between REDNECK RACEGIRL and design of large, double-letter RR configuration and registered mark RACEGIRL, even when used on in part identical goods) and In re White Rock Distilleries Inc., 92 USPQ2d 1282 (TTAB 2009) (holding VOLTA for vodka infused with caffeine, and TERZA VOLTA and vine shoot design for wines, not likely to cause confusion).
Ford has shown an interest in the names of several of its classic cars as evidenced by a selection of recent trademark applications. The company appears to be thinking of using the names Capri, Cortina, Granada, Orion, and Escort once again. The names, inspired by classic Ford vehicles, have been filed with the trademark offices in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand, as first reported by Ford Authority. All are for “land motor vehicles and parts and accessories therefor,” and all were filed for on December 23, 2021, with the European patent and trademark office.
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“There’s a lot of stuff coming from China which is very competitive, and the Koreans are already very competitive with beautiful designs and strong technology, so the question for manufacturers like Ford is ‘how do you position yourself?’,” said Murat Gueler, Ford’s European design chief, in September. “I think we have the unique asset of having nameplates from the past that we can tap into to emotionalize our product and to tell stories no other brand can tell.”
Since the Mustang Mach-E did so well, the company may look to mine its familiar past to ease customers into its newfangled EVs. That said, the use of classic names appears not to be limited to electric vehicles at Ford.
The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union (DG TAXUD) and the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) recently released the first joint annual report on EU enforcement of intellectual property rights: results at the EU border and in the EU internal market 2020.
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ection 6 of the report includes information on overall detentions, meaning only detained and not released items. As such, it is emphasized that the data in this section is not simply the sum of the relevant data contained in sections 4 and 5. This is because “fake goods detained at the EU border but later released are not recorded in the IP Enforcement Portal and, therefore, do not appear in the overall results analysed in this section”.
As such, section 6 was produced based on a subset of COPIS data uploaded into the IPEP (i.e., information on detentions at the EU border), as well as the data used in section 5 (i.e., detentions in the EU internal market reported in the IPEP).
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Overall, the report provides valuable insights into the enforcement of IPRs both at the EU border and in the EU internal market, which will be beneficial when developing countermeasures and implementing policies in the fight against counterfeiting and piracy.
The full report of the EU enforcement of intellectual property rights: results at the EU border and in the EU internal market 2020 (90 pages) is available here.
A recent podcast of the BBC's "In Our Times" program, well-timed for the holiday season, discussed the iconic novel by Charles Dickens, "A Christmas Carol." The podcast reminded the extent to which this novel, with its focus on London, served as a major influencer in refashioning the Christmas celebration, as England was being transformed from a rural into an urban society.
We will consider one aspect of Dickens-as-Christmas celebration influencer, namely, the rise of the turkey as the preferred center of the holiday feast. Before doing so, however, let us consider the circumstances surrounding the novel and its distribution.
The book sold approximately 6,000 copies upon its initial publication in 1843. Such sales figures might have provided Dickens with well-appreciated income, as his economic fortunes had been in decline since his initial success in the 1830's, and his family was expanding.
However, the publishers, Chapman and Hall, had embellished the text not only with lush illustrations but with an ornate cover, in addition to including physical niceties, such as gilt edges and expensive binding, driving up the costs and materially cutting into the book's profits (of which Dickens was entitled to a percentage). Subsequent print runs yielded only marginally additional income.
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Dicken's most lasting concrete influence in refashioning the Christmas tradition. In his time, the goose was the preferred, indeed, main accessible bird to adorn the holiday table, here. The more expensive turkey was the purview of the elite, and the bird was not connected with Christmas. Then came Dickens.
Counsel say infringements on NFT platforms often go undetected, and rights owners must resort to traditional enforcement in the absence of marketplace regulations
