08.02.21
Posted in News Roundup at 2:47 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Desktop/Laptop
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From the makers of the Focus M2 (one of the hottest KDE-specific laptops on the market), comes the new Focus XE. And although it’s focused on those looking for something small in form factor, it’s certainly big in performance.
Sporting 11th generation CPUs and high-speed audio/data ports, this machine isn’t an entry-level, budget-friendly laptop. The specs of the XE include a 4-core processor (Intel Core i7), up to 64GB of 3200 MHz RAM, up to 2TB NVMe storage, and Intel IRIS Xe Graphics. Other features include dual-band 5 GHz wireless, RJ-45 Gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth dual version 5.2, and Thunderbolt v4. You’ll also find two USB-A 3.2 GEN1 ports, and one USB-C 3.2 GEN2 port. An illuminated keyboard with 4mm of travel, a generous trackpad, a 1.0 MP HD webcam, and a 49 Whr Li-ION battery with FlexiCharge Battery Optimization (available in the BIOS), are all housed in a composite aluminum and plastic chassis.
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Linux Magazine
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Kernel Space
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Red Hat’s Marcelo Tosatti has submitted his latest patches implementing a basic task isolation interface for the Linux kernel that would be particularly useful for real-time workloads and high-bandwidth networking applications making use of user-space drivers.
In an effort to eliminate or at least lower operating system noise for relevant user-space applications, this task isolation interface could be used for letting the kernel know that latency-sensitive code is being executed. Applications would notify the kernel via new prctl() options “PR_ISOL_*”.
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I'm announcing the release of the 5.13.7 kernel.
All users of the 5.13 kernel series must upgrade.
The updated 5.13.y git tree can be found at:
git://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git linux-5.13.y
and can be browsed at the normal kernel.org git web browser:
https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-s...
thanks,
greg k-h
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The 5.14-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4″.
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Graphics Stack
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This release of xeyes adds support for using the Present and Xinput2
extensions so that your X server is even smoother when making eyes at you.
Alan Coopersmith (4):
Update README for gitlab migration
Update configure.ac bug URL for gitlab migration
Remove redundant declaration of hypot() for SVR4 systems
xeyes 1.2.0
Keith Packard (3):
Add support for the 'Present' extension. [v3]
Use XI2 raw events to notice when mouse moves [v2]
Clean up compiler warnings
git tag: xeyes-1.2.0
https://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/xeyes-1.2.0.tar.bz2
SHA256: f8a17e23146bef1ab345a1e303c6749e42aaa7bcf4f25428afad41770721b6db xeyes-1.2.0.tar.bz2
SHA512: 2d1614614b3ba3d1ebaa0e9801a2e159389b94aaacafb962d326b7e6dc712c1eb2c12a50ceb10b3135cf0eee6ae86bbf84e73098deb08e73792f14a60616b4d8 xeyes-1.2.0.tar.bz2
PGP: https://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/xeyes-1.2.0.tar.bz2.sig
https://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/xeyes-1.2.0.tar.gz
SHA256: 727e651fd4597f6aa131b67474372a081dccd28ea2cdd364f21dae6e59003ee8 xeyes-1.2.0.tar.gz
SHA512: 95461702cf27615bb7d4eb09b84f9589b810fa905a913b11050b32ce4004a4926e1521b3506a1bf378cb42b0bd6d8735871b6be2382824e2706f4ca24356db45 xeyes-1.2.0.tar.gz
PGP: https://xorg.freedesktop.org/archive/individual/app/xeyes-1.2.0.tar.gz.sig
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Several X.Org/X11 components saw new releases on Sunday for kicking off August, including the xeyes program seeing its first non-point release in eleven years.
The fun XEyes demo program that’s long been around to demonstrate an application following the mouse and rendered using X SHAPE is out with a new release. It’s been 11 years since xeyes 1.1 was released while Sunday brought xeyes 1.2.
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Applications
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Searching for the best Linux educational Software to help with studies? You have come to the right place. Teachers, students, and school administrators have to get creative when it comes to finding quality software that can be free of cost, or at affordable rates.
Quality educational apps are hard to find, particularly on a student budget. Therefore, it makes sense that schools and students turn to open-source software to save up money. Many people don’t have an idea about the various outstanding educational applications that are present for a Linux OS.
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Fwupd 1.6.2 is a massive update and introduces a new plugin for checking Lenovo firmware settings, support for installing UEFI updates from GRUB, initial support for the powerd daemon, support for CapsuleOnDisk, as well as support for soft-requirements that can be ignored with the –force parameter.
In addition, this release adds the ability for devices to only accept version upgrades, allows the discovery of Redfish BMCs specified by MAC or VID-PID and introduces the ability to automatically connect the BMC network interface at startup, and allows fwupd to request interactive action from the end user.
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Instructionals/Technical
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ThinkorSwim is a web-based trading platform developed by TD Ameritrade. It allows users to trade in various stock, options, futures, and equities from the web-based interface. It has also a desktop application available for Windows, macOS, and Linux operating systems. However, it is very complex and designed for advanced users.
In this post, we will show you how to install Thinkorswim on Ubuntu 20.04 desktop.
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Bolt is a lightweight content management system (CMS) built on the popular PHP framework. Bolt is perfect for a small business that wants to maintain its own website without worrying about having to learn HTML and other programming languages. Bolt features advanced features such as robust wiki markups, e-commerce, a photo gallery and album builder, audio gallery and player, and guestbooks.
Boltwire stands out for being completely free of charge for individuals and groups of all sizes who have a need for a CMS. Joe Casabona is the creator of Boltwire and he shares his passion by helping others get the most out of his open-source project. Bolt is used in over 200 countries to manage over 500,000 websites. Its developers are volunteers and expect that all users take part in the project by offering feedback and contributing to its development.
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This should be a really simple topic but I am writing this because I see so many websites recommending strange command line steps for installing Google Chrome on Linux Mint. That would work but that’s unnecessarily complicated, specially for beginners not familiar with the command line.
In reality, you don’t need to go terminal way at all. All you have to do is to go to Google Chrome’s website and download the installer file for Ubuntu and install it.
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There are plethora of Linux Backup applications exists. But deciding which one is best for your requirement is not so easy. In this guide, I am going to explain what is Timeshift, and its benefits and how to backup and restore Linux system with Timeshift.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Apache Solr on Debian 10. For those of you who didn’t know, Apache Solr is an open-source search platform written in Java. Solr aims at providing distributed indexing, replication, and load-balanced querying with automated failover and recovery.
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 Apache Solr on a Debian 10 (Buster).
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In terms of user management, adduser Command in Linux operating system is an important command, which is being used for all administration like work with the system. Actually, either “adduser” or “useradd”, both the commands are functioning in similar ways. Basically, UNIX is a very large operating system which is mainly used as Server as well as Network administrative role. For this, a number of normal users are required to be created in this operating system by the administrator (root) to assign specific tasks and roles to specific users. Hence, creating and managing users is a very sensitive task for administrator (root) of the system.
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I am sure most of us have been through situations where we enter a password, but the system rejects it, repeatedly. Then we realize it’s our fault, as we didn’t notice that the Caps Lock key was on.
Is there a way to avoid such situations? For Ubuntu/Linux, you can use a key lock indicator to display your key lock status on screen. Here we show you two such tools: Lock-Keys and Keyboard Modifiers Status extensions.
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The AWS CLI is a command-line tool to control and manage your AWS services. There are multiple ways of installing AWS CLI on Linux. You can install it using its bundled installer, irrespective of whether you have superuser permissions on your system.
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The beauty of Linux is that it is made by programmers, for programmers. It can run on almost any hardware and there is an endless variety of distributions for almost every use case. It is preferred by programmers for its versatility, scalability, container portability, security, and many other features.
By Nuno Martins, senior channel solutions rchitect at Red Hat
Most importantly, it’s free and open source, which means that it is built and supported by a community of developers who are always at the forefront of innovation and are willing to help each other out.
Knowing a few useful command line tricks can save you a lot of time and frustration. Some you may already know, and others may prove to be a hidden gem you weren’t aware of before. Either way, here are some of the essential command line tips and tricks that I think could save you a couple of keystrokes.
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Want to share the specifics of your Linux system with someone else via the internet but don’t want to go through the trouble of searching for and typing in each detail one by one? Don’t worry; there’s a command-line program called Neofetch that will display all of the information you need right on the terminal.
In this lesson, we’ll go through the fundamentals of installing and using Neofetch. But, before we go any further, please in mind that this tutorial’s instructions and commands were tested on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
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Are you a new user of Linux? Are you looking to start using Linux? Are you want to switch from Windows to Linux?
It totally depends on you, what propose to attract you to have look at this post?
But I assured you, you will get all the information related CentOS including How to install CentOS 8 on VirtualBox and on Computer/Desktop. CentOS/RHEL 8 are similar operating system is working and configuring. RHEL 8 is the most used operating system worldwide in the form of Servers.
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Chrome OS has become one of the most popular desktop operating systems thanks in large part to its availability on a wide range of devices at different price points, ease of use, integration with Google services and strong security. In the past, it’s been widely considered a functional, but ultimately limited environment.
However, Google has done much to change this over the years by adding offline capabilities to many of its services and support for Android applications. One of the most recent and exciting features added to ChromeOS is the ability to run Linux apps. In this guide, we’ll help you get started on installing Linux apps on your Chromebook.
First things first, make sure your device is running at least ChromeOS 69 or later. Make sure you have the most recent version of the OS. You can update Chrome OS by going to Settings > About Chrome OS > Check for updates. Once you’re updated, head over to the Chrome OS Settings again. This time, we’re going to Advanced > Developers and click “Turn On” next to Linux Development Environment.
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gtop is a tool which reads information about processes and the state of the system in dynamic mode. As its name, we can think that it is a graphic top command. It contains some views to monitor your cpu, memory, swap, disk and network usage with a percentage and graphical representation. It also shows you the path of the commands in progress.
Gtop is one of the nifty tool that is capable to display system processes dynamically in graphic mode on your Linux terminal.
As the name implies, Gtop stands for graphic top command which reads system process, memory, CPU, network and disk usage information and populate the results in graphic mode with a percentage.
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Let’s Encrypt is a non-profit certificate authority run by (ISRG) that provides (TLS) encryption certificates at no charge. Certbot identifies the server administrator by a public key. The first time the agent software interacts with certbot generates a new key pair and proves to the Let’s Encrypt CA that the server controls one or more domains. It is similar to the traditional CA process of creating an account and adding fields to that account.
In this tutorial, you will use Certbot to obtain a free SSL certificate for Nginx on Ubuntu and set up your certificate to renew automatically. We will be using the default Nginx configuration file of a server vhosts. We is likely recommend to creating new Nginx server vhosts files for each domain, it helps avoid mistakes. Maintains the default files as a backup configuration as intended if your set up SSL using server is not working.
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Webmin is a web-based control panel for system administration. It is mainly designed for Linux/Unix-like system administrations. Webmin is written in Perl language.
Webmin web interface is used to set up user and disk management, Apache, DNS, PHP, MySQL, check CPU usage, system info, network config, and more.
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Import or Export database from MySQL or MariaDB database from MySQL shell or command line. This is the easiest method to export database or particular table from a database.
If you have a huge database which is more than 500Mb, it will be very hard to export which takes more time to import or export the entire database which may result in timeout error.
In this guide you are going to learn how to import or export database using command line from MySQL shell. You will also learn some fixes to the problems where you cannot export your database.
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In this tutorial, we will show you how to install MongoDB Compass on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Mongo DB Compass is a GUI for Mongo Database software. It’s helpful software for those that want a better GUI way of managing their Mongo DB setups. MongoDB compass allows you to view the real-time performance for DB server metrics.
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 the step-by-step installation of the MongoDB Compass GUI on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
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If you are connecting with a different Linux device on a different network then you would have to expose it to the public internet and that may put your system and files at the risk. Therefore, SSH Tunneling is used to transmit data in a fast and secured manner from source to client machine and vice versa.
SSH Tunneling is a practice of creating a secured and encrypted SSH connection between a server machine and a client machine through which data can be transferred and service can be relayed. In our today’s article, we will see how to set up SSH Tunneling and route your traffic securely via SSH tunnels.
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There are tons of tools available for monitoring your IT infrastructure. This includes monitoring the Linux servers, containers, databases, applications and more.
Services like BetterUptime are convenient and we use it for downtime monitoring.
However, for more granular control, I prefer deploying tools like Prometheus with the beautiful Grafana dashboard.
Recently, I came across a project that gives a complete view of your IT infrastructure within a very short span of time.
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Games
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We’ve been waiting to hear how the lawsuit from Wolfire Games (and others) would progress against Valve, and now we at least have word from Valve on what they think. Naturally, Valve are trying to get the whole thing dismissed. What a shocker, as if we didn’t all expect Valve to fire back and try to shut it all down. What company wouldn’t?
As a quick reminder: the original lawsuit alleges that Valve’s 30% cut is abuse of their market position, and it complains about how Valve handles Steam keys too. David Rosen of Wolfire also tried to clarify some details in a later blog post which claimed that Valve would remove their game Overgrowth if they sold it cheaper elsewhere.
In the new motion filed on July 26, Valve were quite blunt with their reasoning for wanting it all thrown out. The point about Steam keys is an interesting one, as the motion states “Plaintiffs’ allegations that Valve’s Steam Key rules amount to an unlawful PMFN* fail for the straightforward reason that Valve, which created and owns Steam, has no duty under the antitrust laws to create a method (here, Steam Keys) for game developers to sell Steam-enabled games in stores that compete with Steam.”.
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This was a surprise to see. Nanotale – Typing Chronicles from Fishing Cactus, PID Games, 2PGames recently published an official native Linux build. Coming from the same developer who created Epistory – Typing Chronicles, you don’t need to have played their first game as this is a full standalone experience and it looks absolutely gorgeous.
“Nanotale – Typing Chronicles is an atmospheric typing adventure RPG set in a colorful vibrant world. Follow Rosalind, a novice Archivist, as she journeys out to explore a distant world. On her quest to gather knowledge, she collects samples of mystic natural beauties. Everything is peaceful. War is a thing of the distant past.
In the shadows, a tale of dissonant magic is spreading, instilling corruption into broken hearts.”
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Along with other optimizations to benefit the Steam Deck, AMD and Valve have been jointly working on CPU frequency/power scaling improvements to enhance the Steam Play gaming experience on modern AMD platforms running Linux.
It’s no secret that the ACPI CPUFreq driver code has at times been less than ideal on recent AMD processors with delivering less than expected performance/behavior with being slow to ramp up to a higher performance state or otherwise coming up short of disabling the power management functionality outright. AMD hasn’t traditionally worked on the Linux CPU frequency scaling code as much as Intel does to their P-State scaling driver and other areas of power management at large.
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With the X.Org Developers Conference 2021 coming up, they’ve now announced that the initial program schedule is up and there’s a fun sounding talk from AMD developer Ray Huang on working with Valve on new performance scaling design for AMD CPUs.
It’s not a big surprise to see work being done in this area, considering that the upcoming Steam Deck will be based on a custom AMD Zen 2 design with 8 RDNA 2 CUs for the graphics. Performance on such a device is going to make or break it and so Valve appearing to be pushing many different areas to get it sorted and this is just one of them.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Announced in early May, UnityX is the successor to Unity7, and, the next major release, UnityX 10, is planned for later this year as part of the upcoming Ubuntu Unity Remix 21.10 distribution, which, of course, will be based on the forthcoming Ubuntu 21.10 (Impish Indri) operating system release.
UnityX 10 promises great new features compared to Unity7, including a new sidebar design for the application launcher and the opened apps view, a new panel with system tray icons, including for standalone Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and PulseAudio icons, a Logout shortcut, as well as an pplication launcher and an “opened apps” shortcuts.
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Debian Family
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Debian 11 “Bullseye” is set to be released mid-August while out this morning is the third release candidate of the Debian Bullseye installer. With this installer update is more documentation for users letting them know the risks of modern graphics cards and the like that are often inoperable unless loading firmware that isn’t considered free software.
With many modern graphics processors including those from AMD and even the Nouveau driver with recent generations of NVIDIA GPUs, there is often a situation of not only having 3D hardware acceleration not working but even display mode-setting can fail that leads to a blank screen or driving the unaccelerated display at a sub-optimal resolution. Especially for newer GPUs and modern displays, these open-source drivers are useless without the firmware files that are publicly redistributable but binary-only and thus not considered free software. There’s similar situations of network adapters and other components not working without loading the Linux firmware files, but in the case of GPUs it’s rather a blocker if you don’t even have a working display for your desktop.
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Starcat is crowdfunding an open spec, Teensy form-factor “Jupiter Nano” SBC that runs Linux or NuttX on a Cortex-A5 based Microchip SAMA5D. The $65-and-up board offers 128MB RAM, a microSD slot, dual micro-USB ports and 41 I/O pins.
Seattle based Starcat, which has previously launched a HackEEG Arduino shield, has returned to Crowd Supply with an Arduino-like SBC. Although the 63.5 x 28.6mm Jupiter Nano has a quasi Teensy 4.1 form factor, it runs Linux, as well as the open source NuttX RTOS, on Microchip’s SAMA5D27C. The power-sipping SoC has appeared on Microchip’s 40 x 38mm SAMA5D27 SOM and Groboards’ 51 x 23mm, Feather form-factor Giant Board.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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Version 2.34 of the GNU C Library (glibc) is now available with a wide variety of changes that accumulated over the past six months.
Glibc 2.34 is now available and ready to begin appearing with forthcoming Linux distribution updates. Among the many changes to find with GNU C Library 2.34 are:
- All functionality formerly implemented in libpthread, libdl, libutil, and libanl has been integrated into the libc library itself. Empty static archives of these former libraries are still provided so as to not be too disruptive of a change with applications moving forward only needing to link against libc.
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Version 2.34 of the GNU C library has been released. Significant changes include the folding of libpthread, libdl, libutil, and libanl into the main library, support for 64-bit (year-2038 safe) times on 32-bit systems, support for the close_range() system call, a handful of security fixes, and many other changes.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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Early one May morning, I escaped Tucson’s unrelenting grid and drove south through Pima County on Arizona’s state Route 83, into the heart of the Madrean Sky Islands, an almost mythical landscape of shadowy, isolated peaks where several biological zones overlap. The blue-gray Whetstone Mountains marked the distant eastern horizon, the Patagonias loomed to the south, and to the immediate west rose the camelback ridgeline of the Santa Ritas. There, oaks and junipers stippled upper elevations, and rolling swells of grass blanketed low slopes. A haven for wildlife and a balm for those seeking respite in nature, this region contains some of the rarest intact ecosystems and the highest-quality streams among the deserts of the Southwest, providing habitat for ocelots, jaguars, and a dozen other endangered species.
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Monopolies
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Next Generation IP [Ed: Next-generation buzzword/BC. What drugs are those people doing?]
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In late June, the Federal Council of Germany decided not to veto a patent “reform” bill that the country’s Federal Parliament had adopted two weeks earlier. I have previously voiced my opinion that the practical impact is going to amount to a cost increase (particularly affecting defendants) without moving the goalposts unless a plaintiff makes an inexcusable mistake. In particular, patentees should give serious consideration to making a formal licensing offer so as to counter any claims of irreparable harm to a defendant and/or any third parties.
The measure is designed to take immediate effect, but in order to do so, it needs to be signed into law by Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier and, finally, published in Germany’s Federal Law Gazette. The Federal President’s Office informed me today that the bill is presently undergoing a routine check and slated to be signed into law next week (i.e., the week of August 9).
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Patents
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Each year The Intellectual Property Tribunal of the Supreme People’s Court releases a list of top 10 technical intellectual property rights court case decisions. The 2020 list came out a few months ago, and we have been highlighting some of these cases.
Today, we will cover a utility model patent infringement case. As one of the three types of patents one can obtain in China (the other two being invention patents and design patents), utility models are popular due to their reduced costs and relative ease of prosecution (no substantive examination). Some might argue that a utility model patent has limited value, having restricted subject matter eligibility, a shorter term, and lower patentability requirements. Because they are not substantively examined, many “garbage patents” are granted, and then often subsequently invalidated once they are challenged.
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Innovations in digital healthcare – navigating patent challenges [Ed: Notice how they only ever give a platform and voice to patent litigation fanatics and aggressive law firms, not anybody who represent the public interest in this patent battlezone]
Technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR), Robotics and Machine Learning (ML), are increasingly being leveraged across society to enhance the way people live their everyday lives. In recent years, healthcare has become an area of particular focus, with innovative technologies being adopted to monitor health, assist in diagnosis, and manage and treat disease.
From the perspective of European patent law, these new digital health technologies present no new patentability challenges in themselves compared to traditional medical device technology or software in general. However, the coming together of medical device technology and software combines two traditionally separate areas of patent practice which have their own separate issues. On the one hand, under European law, additional hurdles are placed in the way of obtaining patents for software. On the other hand, inventions relating to healthcare technology, pharmaceuticals and medical devices must navigate various medical exclusions. The combination of these two traditionally separate areas of technology means that applicants are often presented with a unique set of challenges. That said, with the right team of experienced patent attorneys working collaboratively, many of these challenges can be overcome at an early stage by the careful drafting of patent applications.
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“Shall be the Property” is not an Assignment of Patent Rights[Ed: Patents are not rights, Dennis Crouch, so quit promoting this propaganda. You're a law lecturer, so surely you know this, but your blog is funded by patent litigation fanatics and profiteers who make a living from misleading judges, legislators etc.]
Dr. Islam is a professor at Michigan (UM). Back in 2012 though he took an unpaid leave-of-absence to start a LASER company. During that time he filed a number of patent applications that came from his time on-leave and that he assigned to Omni. However, UM argued that it owned the patents based upon his employment agreement; that it had expended some ongoing funds; and that Islam had bounced ideas off of some of the faculty members. This argument between Islam and UM was internal. UM did not file any paperwork with the PTO attempting to claim ownership and UM is not a party to the present litigation.
Omni later sued Apple for infringement, but the iPhone giant argued that Omni lacked standing since UM was the real patent owner. The district court sided with Omni — finding that Omni had received rights from the inventor, and that Islam had not assigned his rights to UM. On appeal, the Federal Circuit has affirmed.
[...]
Judge Newman wrote in dissent and argued that “these patents are the property of the University.”
Although both the majority and dissent conclude that the issue is a matter of contract law, neither cite to the governing law of contracts for this case–the law of Michigan.
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Although the grounds of the decision under R. 111(2) EPC do not have to deal in detail with all the arguments of the parties, at least the key points of discussion must be addressed. The grounds must respond to the relevant facts, evidence and arguments and contain the logical chain that led to the formation of the final judgment.
Proceedings before the EPO are governed by the principle of uniformity of the language of the proceedings. For the written copy of the decision, only the language of the proceedings shall be used. Only the decision in a single language of the proceedings meets the requirements of R. 111(2) EPC on the grounds of the decision.
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On July 30, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,923,846, owned by CommWorks Solutions, LLC, an NPE and subsidiary of IP Investments Group LLC. The ‘846 patent relates to the recovery of information in a mobile communications network. It has been asserted against Comcast Cable Communications.
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The EPO has become aware that malicious emails have been sent to European patent attorneys purporting to be from the EPO, containing unsolicited attachments or including links to third party domains. The EPO does not send out such emails. The latest known phishing attempt alleges that the recipient’s Smart Card to access EPO services has expired, but future phishing attempts could be made in relation to other EPO services or e.g. fees.
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Another Transfer from TX to CA: Looking at the Particulars of the Case (But not Too Closely) [Ed: United States shot itself in the foot and discredited the whole patent system by letting courts become like companies that cheat to attract "clients" (lawsuits). By an author funded by litigation fanatics.]
Sito Mobile (SITO) sued Hulu in the Western District of Texas (Waco), alleging infringement of seven of its patents. U.S. Patent Nos. 8,825,887; 9,026,673; 9,135,635; 9,135,636; 9,591,360; 10,009,637; and 10,171,846. Both SITO and Hulu are Delaware companies with Hulu headquartered Santa Monica and SITO in New Jersey (although SITO is currently going through Chapter 11 reorganization bankruptcy).
Although venue was “proper,” Hulu argued that the case should be transferred to the Central District of California for convenience. 28 U.S.C. § 1404(a). Judge Albright refused, but the Federal Circuit has now granted Hulu’s petition for mandamus and ordered the case transferred.
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Software Patents
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AI Can Invent – Australia Is First to Recognise Non-Human Inventorship [Ed: Patent law is becoming ever more deadly (see COVID blunders) and farcical, as it's clear it's anything but beneficial to society and innovation has nothing whatsoever to do with it (a system gamed by bots)]
The Australian Federal Court recently handed down its first-instance judgement in Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879 where the central issue considered was whether an artificial intelligence (AI) system could be an ‘inventor’ for the purposes of the Australian Patents Act 1990 (Act) and its corresponding regulations. The Court found that an AI system can be an inventor – where ‘inventor’ may be construed broadly to include a ‘person or thing that invents’1. This decision puts Australia in the spotlight as a favourable country to patent AI-created inventions – for now. Given the subject-matter and controversy generated by this decision, an appeal to the Full Federal Court is almost certain.
This Federal Court decision is an appeal from a Patent Office hearing where the Office rejected Australian patent application no. 2019363177 in the name of Stephen L. Thaler (the creator of the AI system) on the ground that the AI system (Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience (DABUS)) could not be considered as an inventor in the context of the Patent Regulations 1991.
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The decision taken by an Australian court to recognise that non-humans can be inventors is a courageous one, writes Mark Summerfield. Whether it is the right one, though, is a completely different issue
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Copyrights
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Just before closing down for summer vacation, Advocate General (AG) Saugmandsgaard Øe issued his Opinion in Case C-123/20 concerning the protectability of ‘partial designs’ (design rights for part of a product) as an unregistered Community design right.
The request for preliminary ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) originates from the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof). The German court is currently hearing a dispute between the Italian racing car manufacturer Ferrari and Mansory Design, a car modification company located in Germany [the summary below is based is on the submission by the Bundesgerichtshof to the CJEU, available in German here and in English here].
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Posted in Free/Libre Software at 12:23 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Freenode is now down to just 13,194 online users, which makes it the 6th biggest IRC network. Months ago it was #1 with almost 6 times as many users as those below it. The graph above shows what the latest blunder has done (another massive drop in less than a week, with a poem and the all-time chart at the very bottom).
Freenode is FOSS
So said the BOSS
ROOT gave a TOSS
Wanted us to trust the ToS
Onboard came the edgy
It seemed kind of sketchy
Database down with the wedgie
IRC.com is fund-hedgy
No more anon access
Users and channels gettin’ nervous
A “RITUAL DEFAMATION” thesis
But self-harm being the Nemesis
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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 11:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 504e3afe6abb01e0c9465ee2ce4eb1d2
Summary: Barrier and Synergy can be configured to work properly in conjunction, though only provided different port numbers (non-default) are specified; in my current setup I have two computers to my right, working over Barrier, and two older ones on the left, working over Synergy; the video explains the setup and the underlying concepts
SOFTWARE- or network-based KVM (not the kernel “KVM”) is a wonderful thing with a rich history* and present. For software KVM, in the Free software world there are several options (outside the realm of it there are dozens!) and the most famous one is explained in the above video as I’ve used it for over a decade on many machines and became somewhat of a ‘guru’ at it (out of necessity, I’ve even built things from source when I had difficulties).
In my current setup I get to control 5 low-cost computers (or 8 screens in total) with just one keyboard and one mouse, using both barrier and synergy in conjunction (they’re mostly based on the same code, but the latter, which is the original, became “Open Core”, whereas the former is now the default in GNU/Linux distributions because it is Free software).
Here’s Barrier on my main system (the “server” in the context of this setup):
Here’s Synergy:
In the video I also mention quicksynergy, but it may be mostly obsolete by now though older distros still have it in their repository. It makes setup a lot simpler and faster (hence “quick” in the name). It might be considered obsolete by now, but it still works. With command line tools it’s also possible to configure everything to work in the background since startup (no GUIs required), but the learning curve is steeper. █
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* According to Wikipedia: “Ibus, a now defunct computer company, secured patent US5388032,[1] filed May 4, 1993, showing a KVM with a “discriminator” to connect to multiple computers. The “discriminator” is now known as a KVM switch.” That’s the source of the name. It is a concept that goes nearly 3 decades back. Many people still don’t know about it and never saw it in action.
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Posted in News Roundup at 9:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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Games
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Orbiter Space Flight Simulator is a classic comprehensive 3D space flight simulator and the developer has recently made it open source as they’ve haven’t had enough time for it.
Worth noting that currently it only supports Windows, and it’s a little on the older side with it using DirectX 7. However, since it’s now open source under the MIT license, this gives it a much better chance of seeing more developers come along to potential upgrade it and bring it to more platforms like we’ve seen happen to other projects. There’s already some options being talked about to make it more cross-platform friendly.
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Sounds like development on the co-op survival game Valheim is progressing well, with the first major upgrade Hearth & Home currently on schedule for release this quarter. Hopefully then we will see Hearth & Home before the end of September, if all continues going well.
[...]
This is in addition to what they already announced previously including: darkwood roofs and window hatches; new cooking station extensions like a spice rack, butcher table, pots and pans; tweaks to how stamina and health affect combat to allow for more playstyles; a bunch of new foods like Eyescream, Shocklate smoothie, various wolf meats, and more plus onions you can plant.
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Many games are available on the Google Playstore but finding the perfect small size game with good graphics and best stress reliever is not that easy as it seems oh and action genre too! Follow through as we have listed 16 best Android games under 20 MB that you can download and play.
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Avorion is a single-player or online co-op space survival sandbox game, one where you construct your ships with individual blocks and go explore the galaxy. It’s fantastic and is rated highly by users too and now they’re getting close to a big free update with the 2.0 Beta.
The list of what’s new and improved is a long one. There’s a whole new progression system, which they say is designed to challenge you. “The new progression is meant to challenge you on your way to the center of the galaxy. Players will be required to prove themselves in a new area before they can get their hands on the new building knowledge. But if you don’t like that, you can just go for Avorion Classic!”.
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As we all know the Steam Machines didn’t go anywhere and Valve have clearly learned a lot from it, as they spoke about in a recent video from IGN (as IGN continue to have the exclusives on this).
Valve are no stranger to hardware at this point of course. They didn’t just do the failed Steam Machines but also produced the Steam Link, Steam Controller, worked with HTC for the original Vive and they also have their Valve Index VR headset too. By now, they have hopefully enough experience to know exactly what they need to make a success out of the Steam Deck and so far everything is looking rather positive on that.
Designer Greg Coomer actually mentioned how “we actually did start out by working with other companies and seeing what we could make happen with partnerships, but it became clear we started prototyping and more and more we just started creating devices to solve problems for customers ourselves and really the Steam Deck feels like the culmination of a lot of that earlier work”. Coomer goes on to directly mention their earlier stuff like the Steam Machines, Steam Link and also the Steam Controller.
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Valve has today published its monthly update for Steam Hardware Survey, with an update for July. Besides the regular fluctuations in the market share of CPU and GPU vendors, there is another interesting change slowly happening. According to the newest data from the survey, gaming on Linux has climbed to 1.0% for the first time in years.
Back in 2018, Valve introduced Proton, a technology that translates Windows-specific API calls to Linux equivalents, enabling thousands of Linux gamers to play the games that they wanted to, but were unable because they weren’t using Windows OS.
At the same time, many Linux gamers were trying out the Proton software and the market share of Linux gamers managed to climb to around 2% of a much smaller Steam customer base. However, after this testing period ended, only 0.8-0.9% of gamers were still using Linux distros, and the percentages stayed within that range for some time.
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It’s been a while since we had a new major release of Lutris, the free and open source game manager that allows you to bundle together all of your games in a single application.
Now available as a Beta, Lutris 0.5.9 is the biggest release for some time and adds in initial support for downloading and running games from the Epic Games Store. Much like the Heroic Games Launcher, since Epic don’t support Linux all downloads will be Windows versions you need to then run through a compatibility layer (but Lutris sorts that for you).
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The day I’m sure many have been waiting for, and just as many probably thought it wouldn’t happen. Linux has finally hit 1% again on the Steam Hardware Survey.
Not the first time, in fact years ago when Steam for Linux was pretty fresh we actually saw it remain over 1% for a while. That didn’t last long though, and it’s been bouncing around at sub 1% for multiple years now as we’ve been showing on our dedicated Steam Tracker.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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Please join us at the next regular Open NeuroFedora team meeting on Monday 02 August at 1300UTC in #fedora-neuro on IRC (Libera.chat). The meeting is a public meeting, and open for everyone to attend. You can join us over…
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The technology world changes daily and the demands for computer vision, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are increasing. The technology that allows computers and mobile phones to see their surroundings is called computer vision. Work on re-creating a human eye started in the 50s. Since then, computer vision technology has come a long way. Computer vision has already made its way to our mobile phones via different applications. This article will introduce OpenCV on Fedora Linux.
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This tutorial is going to show you how to set up Postfix SMTP relay with Sendinblue on CentOS/Rocky Linux. Postfix is a popular open-source SMTP server. Previously I wrote an article on how to easily set up a full-blown email server on CentOS/Rocky Linux with iRedMail, which helped a lot of readers run their own email servers.
However, some readers told me that port 25 is blocked by hosting provider/ISP as a way to control email spam, so they couldn’t send emails. Vultr would unblock port 25 if you ask them to, and ScalaHosting doesn’t block port 25 at all, so I recommend using ScalaHosting VPS. Some other hosting providers/ISPs like DigitalOcean would refuse to unblock port 25.
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One of the earliest memes of the early years of the commercial Internet was captured in a famous cartoon in The New Yorker magazine penned by Peter Steiner and showing a dog at a computer, which quipped: “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”
Somewhere back in the archive – it was in September 1997, which is not online because we were a paper, subscription publication for the first seven years of The Four Hundred – we did a riff on this meme with a lead essay called, On The Net, No One Knows You Are An AS/400. This was when IBM has doing its big e-commerce push and the WebSphere variant of the Apache Web server was not yet dominant and Netscape Communications, the big dog in Internet infrastructure servers, was getting ready to port its codes from Unix to OS/400. Netscape came and went, as did I/NET and a few other providers, and WebSphere came to dominate, as often happens when a vendor sells an integrated stack of technology.
Fast forward to 2021, and the world has learned from the hyperscalers such as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and Amazon to think not in terms of Internet protocols and services, but rather at an abstraction layer one notch higher but still below the applications themselves, called appropriately enough the application programming interface, or API, layer. Now, APIs are how programs are stitched together and how infrastructure itself is controlled. So, as we say in the title of this essay, nearly three decades after that meme in the The New Yorker: In a world dominated by APIs, no one knows – or cares or needs to care – if you are an IBM i platform.
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The marketing people at IBM have been at work again, apparently, and it looks like there will be some subtle branding changes coming with the launch of Power10-based servers later this year, very likely by September or maybe October.
One of my pet peeves about the IT industry is that vendors sometimes feel compelled to shout their company names or product brands when it is completely unnecessary. They seem to choose a brand and then work backwards to come up with some abbreviation that they think is clever. It’s when they overreach that it gets annoying, and language is my thing so I get to have this pet peeve.
The Stanford University Network Microsystems company, for instance, was SUN Microsystems, and its Scalable Processor Architecture was shouted out at SPARC. These are not particularly useful acronyms, and thank heavens SUN didn’t call its Unix operating system SOLARIS, with some preposterous meaning backcast on it like SUN Operating Linux Ain’t Real In Systems or even though of yet, since Linux Torvalds had only just started quietly working on it in 1991 for his PC and Solaris came out in 1992, seven years after SUN had started off in the workstation business using its own SunOS and then merged it with the AT&T System V Unix, both of which were variants of the open source Berkeley Software Distribution, or BSD, of Unix. Why shout some things and not the other?
Why shout at all? Hewlett Packard (Enterprise was not yet its core and sole focus) didn’t shout for the sake of shouting, but it had a real acronym that meant something when it launched its Precision Architecture Reduced Instruction Set Computing (PA-RISC) processors for minicomputers running its HP-UX Unix variant and then eventually the HP-3000, which competed with System/3X and then AS/400 iron, had its Multi-Programming Executive, or MPE, operating system ported to these machines. (It never did make the jump to Itanium, as HP’s HP-UX, OpenVMS, and NonStop platforms did. Also, they have all stopped years ago.)
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If you have been patiently waiting for the previously announced Jupiter Nano mini PC and development board capable of running NuttX RTOS or Linux to launch. You will be pleased to know it is now available via the Crowd Supply website offering a high performance ARM based mini computer measuring just 2.86 x 6.35 cm in size. prices start from $65 and worldwide shipping is expected take place sometime during December 2021. Free shipping is provided throughout the United States and worldwide shipping is available for $10.
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When the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 was released in late 2020, we knew that it was destined for embedded server projects. The official Compute Module IO board has all of the connections, but the awkward form factor shows that it was never meant to be used in a project. For project use, we need bespoke carrier boards which break out the required connections.
Seeed’s Dual Gigabit Ethernet Carrier Board is compatible with all Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 boards and is designed to create network devices, file server and software router applications. The inclusion of USB 3.0 is a sweetener for those of us eager to create low power, large storage devices based on the Raspberry Pi.
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The Raspberry Pi 4 is an excellent little computer, but even its biggest fan would have to admit that it’s not very good at streaming fullscreen videos from YouTube. There are some things you can do to improve its performance, but Fenix Pi Mk1 Plasma, a lighter Linux distribution based on the Raspberry Pi OS and running KDE, aims to fix it for good.
The Spanish creator behind Fenix is so into Linux that Chrome’s mouse pointer gains a little Tux penguin when you access the website. As seen in the video from leepspvideo embedded above, it’s able to play a fullscreen 1080p video from YouTube with very few dropped frames on an 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 that hasn’t been overclocked. Looking at the video we can see that Fenix Pi is based upon Raspberry Pi OS, which means that installing software and using the GPIO, camera, etc should be a piece of cake, or is that Pi? The OS is also installable to a USB SSD / flash drive making it a good all purpose Pi distro.
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Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications
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Programming/Development
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Welcome to the August 2021 edition of the monthly Fortran newsletter. The newsletter comes out at the beginning of every month and details Fortran news from the previous month.
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Science
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The French Ministry of Research shared its Second National Plan for Open Science for the years 2021-2024 on 6 July. The Plan foresees several initiatives aimed at increasing the reach of open science principles, and, for the first time, includes open source as a critical component of scientific research that needs to be recognised and supported.
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This second National Plan extends the scope to include source code from research, structures actions promoting data sharing and openness through the creation of the Recherche Data Gouv (Gov Data Research) platform, increases the number of transformative levers available to generalise the practice of open science and is divided up into different disciplines and themes. It is firmly attached to a European-wide vision and, in the context of the French presidency of the European Union, proposes to act in favour of open science being effectively taken into account in both individual and collective assessments for research. This involves initiating a process of sustainable transformation in order to ensure that open science becomes a common and shared practice, encouraged by the whole international ecosystem of higher education, research and innovation.
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Hardware
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Now Mr Huang wants to make it broader and deeper still. In September Nvidia confirmed rumours that it was buying Arm, a Britain-based firm that designs zippy and energy-efficient chips for most of the world’s smartphones, for $40bn. The idea is to use Arm’s design prowess to engineer central processing units (CPUs) for data centres and AI uses that would complement Nvidia’s existing strength in specialised chips known as graphics-processing units (GPUs). Given the global reach of Arm and Nvidia, regulators in America, Britain, China and the European Union must all approve the deal. If they do—a considerable “if”, given both firms’ market power in their respective domains—Nvidia’s position in one of computing’s hottest fields would look near-unassailable.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Ransomware attacks globally surged in the first half of 2021, with 304.7 million, surpassing 2020′s full-year total (304.6 million), says a new report.
After posting record highs in both April and May, cybersecurity firm SonicWall recorded another new high of 78.4 million ransomware attacks in June 2021 alone.
The ransomware showed massive year-to-date spikes in the US (185 per cent) and the UK (144 per cent).
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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This is Polemix, a new, exclusive app aimed at promoting free discourse among young people. As the world’s biggest social networks continuously battle misinformation and draw controversial lines between dangerous and appropriate speech, the founders of Polemix believe they’ve found a better solution: a free market of ideas, with selective admission. So far, the app has attracted a young community that’s eloquent, outspoken, and passionate about the app’s stated philosophy. But it has also served as a microcosmic experiment with online debate culture in concentrated form, and a real-world demonstration of the caveats required to bring such a lofty ideal to life.
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Admitting that it is not easy to detect and remove accounts belonging to people under the age of 13, Facebook has said that it is looking at ways to convince people under age 13 to not lie about their age, including using the artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
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The case alleges that the teleconferencing software program was sharing personal data with various social media platforms, including Facebook and LinkedIn, and was allowing “Zoombombing,” where hackers would disrupt meetings by sharing pornographic images and racial slurs.
A preliminary settlement, which still requires approval from a judge, was filed on Saturday.
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Subscribers in the proposed class action would be eligible for 15% refunds on their core subscriptions or $25, whichever is larger, while others could receive up to $15.
Zoom agreed to security measures including alerting users when meeting hosts or other participants use third-party apps in meetings, and to provide specialized training to employees on privacy and data handling.
The San Jose-based company denied wrongdoing in agreeing to settle.
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Israeli startup Coralogix, a company that develops advanced machine learning log analytics, announced on Thursday that it raised $55 million in a Series C funding round led by Israeli VC firm Greenfield Partners, with participation from Red Dot Capital Partners, StageOne Ventures, Eyal Ofer’s O.G. Tech, Janvest Capital Partners, Maor Investments, and 2B Angels.
The investment brings the company’s total amount raised to $96 million.
Founded in 2015, Coralogix built a platform, Streama, that helps engineering teams manage their log data and provides them with automatic insights while reducing cost. The solution processes millions of log file records and gives monitoring, visualization, and alerting capabilities with no reliance on storage or indexing, solving the challenge of data growth in large-scale systems.
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Defence/Aggression
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By now, George W Bush should have completed volumes one and two of his prison letters.
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If the above were true, then there would have been no revolutions in history. That is quite obviously not the case. Consciousness can change rapidly. It does so exceptionally and under rare circumstances during periods of social upheaval. Yes, not everyday occurrences. But they do happen. “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen,” Lenin famously said. To read this article, log in or or Subscribe. In order to read CP+ articles, your web browser must be set to accept cookies.
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She and her family are among the lucky ones who survived the June attack, in which about 160 people were killed — the deadliest such assault since the once-peaceful West African nation was overrun by fighters linked to al-Qaida and the Islamic State about five years ago. As that violence increases, so too does the recruitment of child soldiers.
The number of children recruited by armed groups in Burkina Faso rose at least five-fold so far this year, up from four documented cases in all of last year, according to information seen by the AP in an unpublished report by international aid and conflict experts.
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Environment
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Energy
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The crisis unfolding on Watt’s 75,000-acre ranch offers a window on a growing problem for the oil industry and the communities and governments that are often left to clean up the mess. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, 3.2 million abandoned oil and gas wells exist in the United States. About a third of them were plugged with cement, which is considered the proper way to prevent harmful chemical leaks. But most haven’t been plugged at all.
Many of the wells are releasing methane, a greenhouse gas containing about 86 times the climate-warming power of carbon dioxide over two decades. Some are leaking chemicals such as benzene, a known carcinogen, into fields and groundwater.
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Finance
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President Joe Biden’s stimulus packages do not fulfill his promise to “build back better.” We must demand more.
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A nationwide eviction moratorium officially expired Saturday after the Biden administration refused to extend it unilaterally and Congress failed to act in time, putting millions of people across the U.S. at risk of losing their homes in the near future as the highly virulent Delta strain tears through the country.
“We cannot be abandoning the up to 11 million Americans that are in need, particularly when emergency rental assistance—the $46 billion that we authorized—has not gotten out.”—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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On June 8, 2021, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador adopted the Bitcoin Law, which will enter into force on September 9, 2021. The law aims to promote economic growth for the country and to facilitate greater financial inclusion of its population, 70% of which does not have access to traditional financial services.
The Bitcoin Law seeks to create basic rules for the use of Bitcoin and consists of 16 articles, which can be summarized as follows:
1. Bitcoin is established as legal tender, adding it to the United States dollar, which was adopted in 2001 (the Salvadoran Colón is a legal tender in El Salvador, pursuant to the Monetary Integration Law, but in practice it is not in current use).
2. All prices can be established in Bitcoin. This is optional and it is left to the discretion of economic agents whether to continue to price in dollars, or to establish some type of price in Bitcoin.
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AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics
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Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Sunday skewered conservative members of the House Democratic caucus who left town for vacation instead of backing an effort to extend the nationwide eviction moratorium that officially expired this weekend, leaving millions of people at imminent risk of being forced out of their homes.
“The House should reconvene and call this vote and extend the moratorium. There’s about 11 million people that are behind on their rent, at risk of eviction.”—Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
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Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi and President Biden announced last week that Washington will end its combat mission in Iraq by the end of the year. However, these long-serving U.S. soldiers are not coming home: many of the 2,500 American service members are expected to remain in the country for “training and advisory” purposes.
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The Washington Post (7/29/21) let the opposition rather than the facts frame its latest story on the new federal directive on testing, masks and vaccination. The headline read:
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The following is adapted from oral testimony given Wednesday before the House Administration Committee about efforts to subvert the election process. The written testimony is here.
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If Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory was a political earthquake that shattered norms and expectations, the 2018 midterm wins by four women of color ought to be seen as a similarly earth-shattering occurrence. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ilhan Omar of Minnesota won seats as Democrats in the House of Representatives, bringing with them a political sensibility that had traditionally been dismissed as too radical. Ocasio-Cortez and Pressley, in particular, beat incumbents who were establishment favorites within the Democratic Party, turning their lack of federal political experience from a liability into an asset.
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Censorship/Free Speech
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Censorship in OTT is among the hot topics which pop out every now and then, what are your views on it?
To me censorship is not a good idea, either for OTT or films, people can’t be forced to watch or restrained from watching certain things. And by the end people will watch what they want to, as everything’s available on the internet. Makers too have to self censor themselves and good stories getting suffered from censorship shouldn’t happen. There could be a certification for the content but censorship is like judging your own people’s maturity. I’m against it.
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Freedom of Information/Freedom of the Press
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“Danish always chose to be on the front lines so that abuses and atrocities could not remain hidden,” said Meenakshi Ganguly, the South Asia director for Human Rights Watch. “The brutality with which Taliban fighters punished Danish proves the abuses that he was documenting.”
Human Rights Watch and other watchdog groups say the Taliban have carried out a series of revenge killings in Kandahar Province, where some of the most brutal episodes in Afghanistan’s last four war-torn decades have occurred.
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Civil Rights/Policing
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VOA Kurdish Service’s Van, Turkey-based stringer Arif Aslan said after Saturday’s protest, police began attacking demonstrators.
Aslan told VOA that police attacked him and prevented him from taking any footage of the clashes. The police, Aslan said, told him that his VOA credentials were not acceptable, and Van’s public prosecutor wanted Aslan arrested.
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Monopolies
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Patents
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What US in-house want from China counsel [Ed: This propaganda mill continues to be just an amplifier of parasitic lawyers' agenda (because they pay for it)]
Sources from four US companies, including Teleflex and USG, say they want regular updates and insight on CNIPA from outside lawyers
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Software Patents/Hey Hi
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Australian court rules an AI can be considered an inventor on patent filings [Ed: Two more patent offices have gone completely bonkers. It's time to consider if this sort of moment is a suggestion we need to scrap the patent system and start it over again. It's rigged and unhelpful to actual innovation. In COVID's case, it is killing millions of people unnecessarily. For profit.]
An Australian Court has decided that an artificial intelligence can be recognised as an inventor in a patent submission.
In a case brought by Stephen Thaler, who has filed and lost similar cases in other jurisdictions, Australia’s Federal Court last month heard and decided that the nation’s Commissioner of Patents erred when deciding that an AI can’t be considered an inventor.
Justice Beach reached that conclusion because nothing in Australia law says the applicant for a patent must be human.
As Beach’s judgement puts it: “… in my view an artificial intelligence system can be an inventor for the purposes of the Act.
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Copyrights
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The U.S. Government is opposing a request from copyright troll lawyer Paul Hansmeier, who asked the court for a reduced prison sentence due to the hardships he endured under coronavirus restrictions. The U.S. attorney notes that these conditions were the same for everyone, and highlights that the lawyer continues to make new victims from his prison cell.
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Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:49 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link | md5sum 1896f135f9b5c796cc52b36da723895a
Summary: The “Mafia” that destroyed the EPO is still being put in charge and is using the EPO for shameless self-promotion; it is never being held accountable, not even when courts demand remediatory action and staff seeks reparations
AN anonymous source told us and showed us that the EPO‘s staff union is planning action to compel António Campinos to obey courts and hold Benoît Battistelli et al accountable for their abuses, which remain untackled. Can a law school be managed by a criminal? Welcome to France, the true home of Campinos! Endless harm continues to be caused by Battistelli’s associates and right now the EPO’s Web site, in its latest “news” item, is boosting Battistelli’s CEIPI (Campinos and Battistelli swapped seats) as if the EPO is still being run for or by this guy from the shadows. Towards the end of the video we also show the overlapping agenda.
The EPO cannot move on until it handles or repairs the past. Shutting tightly a closet with skeletons (while occasionally adding yet more skeletons to it) is assurance that when the bubble implodes it will be truly devastating. It’s like a pressure cooker. Nothing at all has been resolved. Campinos has repeatedly shown that he’s incapable of doing so and he’s still being sort of ‘bossed’ by the fits of Team Battistelli. This is terrible, but what’s even more terrible is the grotesque silence in the media, in effect enabling the crimes and becoming passively complicit. █
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Posted in Courtroom, Europe, Patents at 8:33 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
António Campinos builds on top of Benoît Battistelli‘s actions to euthanise the EPO for a quick 'cash grab'
Summary: Staff of the EPO is coming to realise (or reaching acceptance of the fact) that the spirit of Battistelli — not just people he left in charge of the EPO — dooms the Office and there’s no way out of this mess
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Posted in News Roundup at 3:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Contents
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It’s August already, and this means that we’re getting new releases of Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux. But, until then, this past week brought us new releases of the PulseAudio sound server, KDE Plasma 5.22 desktop environment, as well as the Arch Linux and 4MLinux distributions.
On top of that, I published another awesome monthly roundup of Xfce app updates, and, if you have the time, you can test drive the upcoming releases of MX Linux 21 and Linux Lite 5.6 distributions. You can enjoy these and much more in 9to5Linux’s Linux weekly roundup for August 1st, 2021, below!
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Welcome to this week’s roundup of Linux Releases.
In this week, Amarok Linux 3.1.1, Artix Linux 20210726, Linux Lite 5.6 RC, MX Linux 21 Beta 1, Absolute Linux 20210730, and Freespire 7.7 have been released.
May you have a wonderful week and enjoy your summer!
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Desktop/Laptop
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Amazon Web Services has stolen a march on Microsoft’s cloud desktop plans by adding browser access to its WorkSpaces desktop-as-a-service offering.
Browser access will only work for WorkSpaces running Windows. Linux users are out in the cold and AWS hasn’t said when or if penguin-powered desktops will get to play. The service uses Amazon’s WorkSpaces Streaming Protocol (WSP), which doesn’t allow use of graphics-intensive instance types. AWS customers that run WorkSpaces from the Asia Pacific (Mumbai) and GovCloud (US-West) Regions also need not apply.
For the rest of us, the service means browsers are now approved clients for an AWS WorkSpace – but not without complications. WorkSpaces set up to stream over the PCoIP protocol will work in Chrome or Firefox. WSP WorkSpaces can use any Chromium-based browser.
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Audiocasts/Shows
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Microsoft’s next kernel patch fixes a long-standing Linux issue, we’ll share the details. Plus ChromeOS’s next power user feature you haven’t heard of, and Valve’s broader plans that came into focus this week.
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Josh and Kurt talk about a story from Microsoft declaring Rust the future of safe programming, replacing C and C++. We discuss how tooling affects progress and why this isn’t always obvious when you’re in the middle of progress.
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On this episode of This Week in Linux, we’ll cover the modular laptop that respects your Right to Repair called the Framework laptop. In the Distro News, we’ve got updates from Linux Mint and a very interesting potential plan for a Rolling Release edition of Pop!_OS from System76. We’re going to jump into an enterprise grade tool with Apache Cassandra 4.0. Then in the Linux Mobile News, we’ve got an interview with Rudi Timmermans of the WayDroid project which is looking to make it possible to run Android Apps on Linux Phones like Ubuntu Touch. We’ve also got news from NVIDIA, they’ve released new Drivers with a lot of great features and they’ve even Open Sourced some content. All that and so much more on episode 162 of This Week in Linux, recorded live on July 31, 2021. Your Weekly Source for Linux GNews!
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Kernel Space
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Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4. It's mostly a very nice and
flat diffstat - so small spread out changes - with the exception of a
couple of blips in selftests and the xfs fixes.
Mostly drivers, some arch updates, networking, plus tooling and
selftests. Nothing odd stands out.
Shortlog appended for people who want to scan the details,
Linus
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Linux 5.14-rc4 is available today as a rather smooth update with nothing too worrisome but just a decent amount of fixes and nothing that is causing Linux creator Linus Torvalds to be frustrated.
Linus briefly summed it up in the 5.14-rc4 announcement, “Nothing to see here, entirely normal rc4. It’s mostly a very nice and flat diffstat – so small spread out changes – with the exception of a couple of blips in selftests and the xfs fixes. Mostly drivers, some arch updates, networking, plus tooling and selftests. Nothing odd stands out.”
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Instructionals/Technical
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This is a series that offers a gentle introduction to Linux for newcomers.
Ubuntu has a very different file system compared to Windows. It’s organized in a completely different way designed to offer more security, but it’ll feel very unfamiliar if you’ve come exclusively from a Windows background.
It’s therefore worth devoting time to learning about the file system in Ubuntu.
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On Windows, Microsoft provides a free cloud storage service in the form of OneDrive. It comes integrated with Windows and you get 5 GB of free storage with your Microsoft account.
This works great on Windows but like Google, Microsoft also does not provide a native client for OneDrive on Linux desktop.
You can access your OneDrive data through browser, of course. In addition to that, there are some other ways to access OneDrive on Linux.
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As you may already know, Red Hat decided to abandon the vanilla CentOS 8 project, which will reach end-of-life on December 31, 2021, and shift its focus to CentOS Stream. This tutorial is going to show you how to migrate from CentOS 8 to Rocky Linux 8/Alma Linux 8.
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qBittorrent is a cross-platform free and open-source BitTorrent client. qBittorrent is a native application written in C++ which uses Boost, Qt 5 toolkit, and libtorrent-rasterbar library and is extremely lightweight and fast. qBittorrent is very popular amongst torrent users as the main alternative to UTorrent.
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MariaDB is a free and community-developed relational database system that is a compatible drop-in replacement for the hugely popular MySQL database management system.
It was forked from MySQL after the original developers of MySQL expressed their misgivings with the acquisition of MySQL by Oracle. Since then, MariaDB is guaranteed to remain free and open source under the GNU license.
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Hello Linux Geeks, if you are looking for free command line backup tools on Linux systems then tar command is the solution for you. Tar command can create backup of your application, configurations files and folders of the system.
Tar stands for ‘tape archive’ and can archive multiple files and directories into a tar file. This tar can also be compressed using gzip and bzip2 compression utility. Once we have a tar backup ready then we can easily transfer it to remote backup server using scp or rsync commands.
In this post, we will demonstrate how to create backup with tar command in Linux.
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KDE Plasma 5.22 with its tagline Stability, Usability, Flexibility released last June is the latest desktop technology of KDE and Free Software Community. It features new looks to the desktop, System Settings and many other improvements. Want it? If you would love to try it or further install it for daily use, here’s how to.
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VLC has a really neat feature which consists of time-stretching audio to allow users to speed up or slow video playback with the [ and ] keys without affecting the pitch of the sound. I recently switched to Kodi as my video player of choice and I was looking for the equivalent feature.
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Hello and welcome to another article about Kubernetes. In this article we will go through the Kubermatic installation on Hetzner Cloud. But first of all let us go through a few questions:
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Damn Vulnerable Web Application (DVWA) is a PHP and MySQL web application that is a free and open-source vulnerable web application. Its main goal is to aid security professionals in testing their skills and tools with various levels of difficulty to help web developers better understand the processes of securing web applications.
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If your PC is running slow or you’re having issues installing updates and software, there’s a high chance you might be running out of disk space. The handy du command makes it convenient for Linux users to stay aware of their disk consumption and make an upgrade if required.
But how exactly do you issue this command on Linux? Let us find out.
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MX Linux is an operating system based on the Debian stable. The system is generated from a cooperative venture between the AntiX and former MEPIS communities. This is a mid-weight Linux distro designed with a nice look, an efficient desktop with simple configuration, and greater solid performance.
It also has basic tools like a graphic installer that generally handles the computer’s UEFI, a GUI-based method to change a Linux kernel, and other core programs.
After that brief introduction of MX Linux, let us go through the system’s installation process on our VMware workstation. We will channel our concentration from the normal setup to installing the OS with the disk encryption option.
Note: You can diversify your MX Linux knowledge on its features since we also have another article that has covered all the MX Linux features. The latter will take you through a video guide of its features.
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Today we are looking at how to install the WaterFox Browser on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
If you have any questions, please contact us via a YouTube comment and we would be happy to assist you!
This tutorial will only work on Chromebooks with an Intel or AMD CPU (with Linux Apps Support) and not those with an ARM64 architecture CPU.
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This article will cover the steps needed for you to update your Kali Linux system repo. The Kali Linux Operating system is Debian-Linux-based. The distribution comes with several advanced tools meant for streamlined utilities, accuracy boosting, quick and easy execution of pen-testing, and social engineering tools.
Like any other Linux distro, Kali supports audio play files, office, web browsers, programming software, and other software supported by either major OSs (Windows and macOS). Additionally, the OS comes with a Kali NetHunter App Store used in easing browsing, installation, and keeping your apps up to date.
Kali Linux comes with a large set of tested and pre-installed applications, making it simpler for use than other systems. The system was officially released into the market in 2013 as a complete re-branding of Backtrack Linux with a GNOME UI. Their developers ripped all the unwanted stuff off Backtrack by getting rid of junky utilities and updating the useful ones in the white-hat community.
To add on, the OS includes slightly over 600 completely free tools. It also has an open-source Git tree that is publicly available. It is a well-known OS among Cybersecurity professionals.
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Fish Shell stands for friendly interactive shell which is fully-equipped, smart and user-friendly command-line shell that supports a lot of handy features unlike any other shell.
Features are Autosuggestion, Sane Scripting, Man Page Completions, Web-Based configuration and Glorious VGA Color.
Fish shell makes your command line more productive, useful & fun without remembering a bunch of Linux commands because of their handy features.
let’s go ahead and install it by following the below steps.
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Ubuntu-based distros feature several package management systems for installing, upgrading, managing dependencies, and removing software. Advanced Packaging Tool (APT) is the default package manager for distros like Ubuntu, Debian, Linux Mint, and POP!_OS.
APT works with the apt command in Ubuntu to provide access to over 60,000 software packages, dependencies, metadata, and instructions to install software applications in your system.
This article guides users on working with APT through the apt command, searching, installing, updating packages, upgrading a system, and adding extra repositories for additional software. It will also introduce other package managers like aptitude and dpkg.
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ySQL is among the most popular database managers in the world. It contains many features that make it reliable, efficient, and robust. Its maximum reliability is achieved if it is rightly used. Creating users with limited permissions on the database is one of the easiest and reliable ways to increase MySQL security.
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In this article, we are going to show you everything you need to know about Docker logs and how to work with them.
Life would be much simpler if applications running inside Docker containers always behaved correctly. When things inevitably start going wrong you need diagnostic information to figure out how and why.
If you are a system administrator and responsible for building and managing containerized applications, docker logging is one of the most important for you. Dealing with the logs are one of the best ways to help reveal errors, aid in debugging, and optimize your application’s performance.
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Games
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Not only did Valve announce Steam Deck in July but the overall Linux gaming marketshare according to the Steam Survey also hit a multi-year high.
According to the Steam Survey numbers out today for July 2021, Steam on Linux hit a 1.0% marketshare, or a +0.14% increase over the month prior.
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Desktop Environments/WMs
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Welcome back. This is my last (or second to last) blog post for this year’s Google Summer of Code with Xfce and Thunar. Unlike previous weeks this time I have only one new thing to talk to you about. Searching in Thunar.
Most of you might have noticed that Thunar has had a significnt deficiency for a while. Thunar has been missing a decent solution for searching for files in the filesystem. Users could search for files in the selected directory, but even that was a pretty mediocre experience, because results weren’t being filtered while searching. Fortunately there is another program under the Xfce umbrella that makes searching for files a breeze. That program is, of course, Catfish. Unfortunately this status quo requires users to juggle between Thunar and Catfish even when searching for simple things.
In the past two weeks I’ve been working on two things. First, making Catfish easier to use through Thunar. Second improving Thunar’s built-in search features to make routine and/or simple searches possible without leaving Thunar. The first improvement is pretty straightforward. A new button has been added that allows the user to open catfish with the specified search query from inside Thunar. As far as the improving the built-in search features goes, I’ve implemented a basic depth-limited recursive search in Thunar that is accessed from the location bar, which can now be used as both a location bar and a search bar. As the user types his/her search query the view is updated with the results. For convenience in addition to the current directory and its subdirectories, Thunar searches the GTK-Recent database for eligible entries.
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GNOME Desktop/GTK
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You may have just now noticed that the GNOME developers documentation website has changed after 15 years. You may also have noticed that it contains drastically less content than it used to. Before you pick up torches and pitchforks, let me give you a short tl;dr of the changes:
Yes, this is entirely intentional
Yes, I know that stuff has been moved
Yes, I know that old URLs don’t work
Yes, some redirections will be put in place
No, we can’t go back
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While reading the documentation, I came across a bug that was leading to broken links. After some debugging and testing, I was able to fix the bug. It was due to a missing configuration in the documentation engine.
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Reviews
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Back in May I briefly talked about Arch Linux’s User Repository (also known as the AUR). Arch Linux itself has a relatively small collection of official software packages and so many members of the Arch community (and those who use its derivative distributions) run packages from the AUR. The AUR contains scripts provided by third-parties which enable software to be installed using scripts. While installing software this way manually can be tedious, there are any number of helper programs which assist Arch users in building and installing software from the AUR scripts.
As a result, Arch Linux, which has a relatively small number of official packages (11,945 at the time of writing) can offer an additional 70,500 through the AUR collection. This puts the combined collection of Arch software in a similar range as Debian and Ubuntu. In the article from May we touched on a number of methods other distributions use to augment their official repositories with third-party software. These methods included Nix, Copr, Slackbuilds, and personal package archives (PPA).
One project which has come along since then is called Pacstall. The Pacstall project aims to provide Ubuntu users with a third-party repository similar in style to Arch’s, along with a convenient command line tool to automate most of the work. “Pacstall will attempt to become the AUR Ubuntu wishes it had. It takes the AUR and puts a spin on it, making it easier to install programs without scouring GitHub repos and the likes.”
Pacstall can be set up using a Deb package or a single-line shell command. I decided to take Pacstall for a spin on Ubuntu MATE 21.04 to see how it would perform. Reading the description of the project I was uncertain of where third-party software scripts would be coming from. For instance, I was unclear as to whether Pacstall would use (and possibly translate) existing AUR scripts or if it would be duplicating the work of the AUR in a new approach. I was unable to find documentation which explained where these scripts came from and how many there were.
With a little looking around I discovered Pacstall learns how to install packages from another repository specific to this program. Which means it is not connected to or learning from the AUR, simply providing a similar service. At the time of writing there are about five dozen recipes for building third-party software in the Pacstall repository. So how well does it work?
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Arch Family
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At the end of July, I had some days off and some more time to focus on some unreproducible packages in Arch Linux and get some of the issues resolved. This post goes through the resolved issues by category.
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IBM/Red Hat/Fedora
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After a pedal-to-the-metal year of digital transformation, it may be tempting for leaders to ease up on the gas. However, it is only a matter of time before “life happens” and we experience the next major interruption, says Greg Bentham, vice president, cloud infrastructure services at Capgemini Americas. “Now that we are emerging out of the pandemic in many parts of the world, the biggest lesson learned is that companies that had a clear digital strategy have emerged even stronger than ever.”
“Companies that had a clear digital strategy have emerged even stronger than ever.”
COVID-19 also taught us that in expecting the unexpected, a solid technology strategy goes a long way. “Across our industries and through our boards, we’ve seen those advantages realized through both commercial productivity and an internal ease with business and employee retention,” says Jay Upchurch, CIO at SAS. “This puts more pressure on CIOs to drive digital transformation faster.”
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To open a directory on a computer with a graphical interface, you double-click on a folder. It opens, and you are now “in” that folder.
To open a directory in a terminal, you use the cd command to change your current directory. This essentially opens that folder and places you in it.
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Red Hat OpenShift 4.8 brings many exciting new capabilities for developers. This article focuses on what’s new in the OpenShift console, including devfiles and certified Helm charts in the developer catalog, the ability to drag and drop Spring or Quarkus JARs directly from your desktop, a streamlined developer experience for building, deploying, and scaling cloud-native applications in hybrid-cloud environments, and much more. Developers will also find enhanced features for Red Hat OpenShift Serverless, Red Hat OpenShift Pipelines, Red Hat OpenShift GitOps, and more.
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Debian Family
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Debian 11 “Bullseye” is due to be released in about a week, so I thought, why not, update EasyOS from the Buster-series to the Bullseye-series.
Built it, booted, and got a working desktop. Some issues though…
NetworkManager isn’t working, so used SNS to connect to the Internet.
Bluealsad reports a failure due to problem with dbus.
Some packages are missing, for example required by libreoffice.
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There are many hardware platforms based on Raspberry Pi CM4 system-on-module, but in most instances, only the baseboard is provided, and you have to handle mounting and/or make an enclosure by yourself.
One of those boards was Seeed Studio’s “Dual Gigabit Ethernet Carrier Board for Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4”, which as the name implies, offers two Gigabit Ethernet ports, as well as two USB 3.0 ports, and a micro HDMI port for video output. I say “was” because the company has now designed a PC/ABS case with an aluminum alloy cover acting as a heatsink to keep the RPi CM4 module cool.
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Open Hardware/Modding
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While trying to think of his next project, Herwig Taveirne came up with the idea to craft some kind of levitating display that can showcase certain objects. Some of the criteria included completely magnetic levitation, stable floating, and overall safety since magnets can get quite hot when in use.
The floating globe case was constructed with a wooden lantern as its base, which helps everything look cleaner. The top of the lantern houses a large electromagnet that faces towards the bottom, along with a Hall-effect sensor that dangles below it to measure the distance between the globe and the magnet. An Arduino Nano is responsible for controlling the lifting magnet based on what the sensor reads in order to keep a stable position. There is also a set of six other coils at the base that get activated depending on the current rotation of the globe, and these provide small boosts to one side of the globe to keep it spinning smoothly.
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Ferrofluid is an interesting substance that is attracted to a magnetic field. While manually playing with a flask of such goo is interesting for a few minutes, GreatScott! had other ideas. His 3D-printed rig arranges a half-dozen custom electromagnets on the side of the flask. This allows an Arduino Nano to control the magnetic field arrangement, and thus fluid movement, with the help of six MOSFETs.
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Dav1d 0.9.1 was released on Sunday as the newest feature update to this leading open-source CPU-based AV1 video decoder.
Dav1d 0.9.1 principally benefits those on older CPUs such as processors supporting SSE2 and SSE4 but not the newer AVX-era Intel/AMD CPUs. There are 10-bit optimizations for SSE4, 10 and 12-bit SSSE3 optimizations, and a variety of other improvements to Dav1d’s SSE2/SSE4 Assembly. There is also film grain Arm NEON support and other fixes.
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SaaS/Back End/Databases
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PostgreSQL Weekly News is brought to you this week by David Fetter
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FSF
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GNU Projects
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This is to announce diffutils-3.8, a stable release.
There have been 47 commits by 5 people in the 2.6 years since 3.7.
See the NEWS below for a brief summary.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed!
The following people contributed changes to this release:
Bruno Haible (2)
Dave Odell (1)
Jim Meyering (23)
KO Myung-Hun (1)
Paul Eggert (20)
Jim [on behalf of the diffutils maintainers]
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The GNU C Library version 2.34 is now available.
The GNU C Library is used as the C library in the GNU system and
in GNU/Linux systems, as well as many other systems that use Linux
as the kernel.
The GNU C Library is primarily designed to be a portable
and high performance C library. It follows all relevant
standards including ISO C11 and POSIX.1-2017. It is also
internationalized and has one of the most complete
internationalization interfaces known.
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Health/Nutrition
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Marketing authorisations (MA) and their legal status have become increasingly interesting for anyone working in the medicinal products area. The recent CJEU ruling on July 8th in the case C-178/20 Pharma Expressz (find here), is especially so. There, the CJEU brings further clarification to the provisions of the Medicines Directive 2001/83/EC (find here) in the context of MA.
A medicinal product not subject to medical prescription in one Member State may not be placed on the market in another Member State unless that Member State, too, has granted its marketing authorisation. In the absence of such an authorisation, it still may be possible to supply that medicinal product where its use meets special medical needs in accordance with EU law.
Pharma Expressz, a Hungarian company, attempted to place its medicinal products on the market in Hungary without complying with the requirements stipulated by Hungarian law, i.e. had not applied for an MA. Consequently, the Hungarian authorities ordered the company to stop its importation of the products.
Under Hungarian law, medicinal products without an MA, issued either by the Hungarian authorities or the European Commission, may be placed on the market only where their use for medical purposes is notified to those authorities by a medical practitioner prescribing medicinal products. In order to comply with the requirements, the medicinal practitioner needs to obtain from the competent governmental authorities a declaration concerning the specific use. This procedure was not followed in the case by Pharma Expressz since the medicinal products at hand were sold without prescription.
Pharma Expressz appealed the decision, refusing marketing authorisation, to the Fővárosi Törvényszék (Budapest High Court, Hungary). On appeal, Pharma Expressz claimed that the specific requirement of compliance with Hungarian law regulations was contrary to EU law because the medicinal products in question had previously been granted marketing authorisation in another Member State and the products were available without medical prescription.
In its ruling, the Court stated that the Medicines Directive (Articles 70-73) requires that an MA is granted by the competent authorities of that Member State, or under the centralized procedure established by the Commission, in order for a pharmaceutical product to be placed on the Hungarian market. Thus, a medicinal product placed on the Hungarian market needs either an MA by the Hungarian authorities, or an MA authorization through the centralized procedure of the European Medicines Agency. This requirement applies whether the medicinal product is sold under prescription or not.
The alternative procedure, namely that of mutual recognition, requires the application of strict conditions, such as the MA application for a given medicinal product in one Member State with the objective to recognize that specific MA in yet other Member States. The factual situation in the case at hand does not meet these requirements.
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. The recall is being issued due to the potential presence of small plastic pieces in the product, officials say.
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Integrity/Availability
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Proprietary
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Security
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Privacy/Surveillance
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The patent explains how the technology will work, saying, “An optical imaging array is aligned with the aperture. Above the aperture, the display is arranged and/or configured for increased optical transmittance. For example, a region of the display above, or adjacent to, the imaging aperture can be formed with a lower pixel density than other regions of the display, thereby increasing inter-pixel distance (e.g., pitch) and increasing an area through which light can traverse the display to reach the optical imaging array.”
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Finance
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Railroads are finding it difficult to hire workers and their labor shortfall has prevented them from meeting transportation demand.
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Monopolies
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India counsel call for design system overhaul [Ed: By "Sources" they mean sponsors and they moan for "interested parties during litigation" i.e. international law firms rather than people of India. This is a propaganda mill for colonialism through unjust laws, imposed by blackmailing officials]
Sources criticise the current examination process in India and how it holds back interested parties during litigation and elsewhere
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The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international agreement that is administered by the World Intellectual Property Office (WIPO) with the aim of streamlining the securing of patents in multiple jurisdictions. The patent offices of approximately 150 countries and multi-country regions, participate in the running of the PCT, including the Australian Patent Office (IP Australia) the European Patent Office, the US Patent and Trademark Office, The Chinese Intellectual Property Office, and the Japanese and Korean Patent Offices.
One of the features of the PCT is that after lodging an international patent application with the Applicant’s “Receiving Office” (usually the Patent Office in which the Applicant resides) the Applicant then receives an international search report (ISR), and written opinion on patentability (WO). Most commonly the Receiving Office (RO), the International Search Authority (ISA) and the International Preliminary Examining Authority (IPEA) are a department (or departments) of the Applicant’s local Patent Office and so the ISR and WO issue from the same Patent Office. However, depending on the Receiving Office that the international application is filed with, it may be possible for the Applicant to choose between a number of ISA’s. Some example RO’s and their competent ISAs and IPEAs are set out in the table below:
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Locally sourced items such as cutlery, marble and tweed could soon be given the same protection as cheese and wine, but could it work in practice?
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The economic value of designs [Ed: They mean monopolies on designs. Yes, monopoly is good for monopoly "owner"...]
In a 2016 study, 75% of German consumers said that design was more important to them than it had been five years earlier (study by Adobe, “State of Create”, 2016, p. 22). Nearly half of the consumers were willing to spend more money for a product with good design. In a time where the products with which we surround ourselves define who we are, product design is essential to our purchasing decisions. This also applies to fast-moving consumer goods. For that reason, product design has developed into one of the most important marketing tools and decisive competitive factors. Today, a successful brand is defined not only via the trademarks used, but also by unique and memorable designs.
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Pfizer challenged the most ANDAs, Aurobindo filed the majority of applications and Williams & Connolly managed the most cases, according to new data
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Seven months after the EU announced measures to raise IP awareness among SMEs, sources discuss their potential and where the bloc should focus next
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Patents
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Since the beginning of 2021, a new cost regime regarding the legal fees for lawyers and courts applies in Germany. Roughly estimated, this will lead to a fee increase of 10 %. This article provides an overview.
Cost issues in patent infringement and patent nullity proceedings
Unlike many other foreign legal systems, Germany has a costs regime that is guided by the principle that the losing party in a legal dispute should bear the costs of the legal dispute. As a consequence, the losing party must pay both court costs and opposing attorneys’ fees. There is a legal framework for this with tables that show how much these costs to be paid by the losing party are in detail. If the party has not reached a different agreement with its own attorney and/or patent attorney, these statutory rules may also determine which fee is to be paid to these own attorneys / patent attorneys – irrespective of the outcome of the proceedings.
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In this paper I investigate the role of private information in a patent race. Since firms often do their research in secrecy, the common assumption in patent race literature that firms know each other’s position in the race is questionable. I analyze how the dynamics of the game changes when a firm’s progress is its private information, and I address the question whether revealing it might be to a firm’s advantage. I find that a firm has an incentive to reveal its breakthrough only if its rival has not done so, and only if the research is costly.
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IP Waiver for COVID-19 Vaccines: What the United States’ Support Means in Practice [Ed: All those patent lawyers that lobby to kill millions of people just to keep prices artificially high with patents dig their own grave; the public opinion on the patent system is rapidly shifting]
On May 5, 2021, the Biden Administration announced its support for waiving intellectual property protections for COVID-19 vaccines. Understandably, the news made headlines and stirred passionate reactions from the medical community and IP holders alike. But actually bringing about that waiver will be a complicated process, and one that depends on many countries and parties besides the United States.
The text of the Administration’s announcement shows that waiving international IP protections will be easier said than done:
The Administration believes strongly in intellectual property protections, but in service of ending this pandemic, supports the waiver of those protections for COVID-19 vaccines. We will actively participate in text-based negotiations at the World Trade Organization (WTO) needed to make that happen. Those negotiations will take time given the consensus-based nature of the institution and the complexity of the issues involved.
In other words, it is the WTO as a whole that must effectuate an IP waiver. And given that WTO decisions are made by unanimous agreement of its 164-country membership without any formal vote, that process will require far more than support from the United States, as dissent from any one country on the terms of a waiver would block the initiative.
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In a decision released by the Intellectual Tribunal of China’s Supreme People’s Court (SPC) on July 23, 2021, the SPC explained that a granted utility model patent may be unenforceable when a corresponding invention patent application was rejected during substantive examination. The plaintiff had filed both utility model and invention patent applications on the same day for the same invention. While the utility model granted, the invention patent application was rejected in substantive examination for lacking novelty and inventiveness.
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Tesla has obtained today a design patent for the Cybertruck, and the patent application references several interesting prior designs that could have influenced Tesla’s unique design.
Today, Tesla was granted three design patents for the Model Y, Roadster, and the Cybertruck.
The latter is interesting because it features a radical design that has been controversial.
Some praise it, while others think it looks like garbage.
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An Ohio-based company is suing Apple for selling smart water bottles that connect to smartwatches like an Apple Watch, allegedly infringing on two patents covering similar technology.
The plaintiff in the case is non-practicing entity Xennial IP LLC, which owns U.S. Patent No. 7,792,409 and U.S. Patent No 10,664,571. Both properties cover a “communicative sports water bottle” that can connect to a smart device and track health metrics like water intake.
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As readers familiar with the telecoms sector will be well aware, Barcelona hosts every February the Mobile World Congress (“MWC”), the most important international trade fair in this field. Due to the pandemic, last year the organizers decided to cancel the show scheduled for February 2020. This year, a downsized version of the MWC was held between 28 June and 1 July 2021.
To help resolve in an expeditious way intellectual property disputes that may arise during the MWC, 7 years ago, the Commercial Judges of Barcelona decided to approve a Protocol that seeks to guarantee that cases are resolved within extremely short time frames. This year, on 5 May 2021, the Commercial Judges of Barcelona held a meeting with the Commercial Judges of Alicante, who have competence to hear cases dealing with EU trademarks and designs, and agreed the following measures: a) to give priority handling of intellectual property and unfair competition cases relating to products to be exhibited at the fair; b) to resolve preliminary injunction applications conducted “ex parte” within 48 hours and those conducted “inter partes” within 10 days, provided that a protective letter had been filed; c) to decide on the admissibility of protective letters within 24 hours; d) to hold hearings via remote connection; and e) that the Barcelona Commercial Courts would immediately enforce any preliminary injunctions and/or other urgent measures approved by the Alicante Commercial Courts in cases involving EU trademarks and/or designs.
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In this decision of the Patents Court, Meade J dismissed an infringement claim brought by Promptu against Sky, on grounds that Promptu’s patent lacked inventive step. The decision is interesting as it grapples with issues of infringement where some steps of a claimed method are performed outside the UK. The decision also provides helpful guidance on the instruction of experts in cases involving lengthy prior art documents.
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D3O: Making an Impact in Personal Protective Equipment [Ed: Two people were exploited by criminals who engage in corruption at the EPO as a reputation-laundering distraction]
D30 is an orange goo that you can wrap around your hands and then, if you whack with a mallet, you will notice that nothing happens to your hand. The first D3O material was developed by Philip Green and Richard Palmer, two inventors who were finalists of the European Inventor Award 2019, organized by the European Patent Office (EPO).
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There are two key reasons for which cases with overlapping issues get consolidated in the U.S. (if necessary, this may even involve a venue transfer). The first one is that divergent decisions are highly undesirable. The second is efficiency (for the court and the parties). Not so in Germany, where each patent is litigated separately unless two or more patents are from the same patent family. Inconsistent rulings by German courts are possible for another reason: judges aren’t bound by precedent (no stare decisis etc.).
With respect to standard-essential patents (SEPs), there was a period of a few months during which one patent litigation division of the Mannheim Regional Court–the Second Civil Chamber under Presiding Judge Dr. Holger Kircher–applied EU case law (Huawei v. ZTE) differently from the other–the Seventh Civil Chamber under Presiding Judge Dr. Peter Tochtermann. I declared myself in agreement with the latter, but then came the first of two Sisvel v. Haier decisions by the Federal Court of Justice, and Judge Kircher as well as his colleagues in Munich “won.”
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In our latest webinar, Unified’s Chief IP Counsel, Jonathan Stroud, was joined by Joseph Matal, Partner at Haynes and Boone, LLP, to discuss reform proposals for improving the quality of issued U.S. patents.
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Over the decades (sigh) I’ve been involved in various capacities in cases where practitioners have missed deadlines. Sometimes, the client’s partly to blame. For example, imagine a client at the last minute dumping a lot of information they expect to be included in an application or any claim is barred (say by a prior publication). At other times, the lawyer misses the date. For example, imagine key docketing personnel leave and that leaves a knowledge gap, or an unanswered email box, allowing a deadline to pass by.
Obviously, having dual docketing systems is important. Ensuring dates are entered correctly is important. Ensuring that there is a person responsible for the deadline, likewise important. And, of course, much of this is now automated.
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Intellectual property is a corner stone in the long-term strategy of many companies, this is especially true for those in the life sciences space. Covid-19 was a hammer blow to the global economy and many life sciences firms were forced to reconsider their strategies, including with regard to acquisitions, research and development, and intellectual property. In 2019, biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies spent $306 billion on IP-related activities, compared to only $140 billion in 2020, a 54% decrease (Lexology). Although this slump might be alarming to some, with last year’s losses creating over $1.4 trillion in excess funds, 2021 is set to be a memorable year for intellectual property as the life sciences sector recovers.
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Life sciences have been tremendously impacted by artificial intelligence; it could be argued that life sciences companies are slowly transitioning into biotech firms. As the implementation of AI on inventions, intellectual property teams are at crossroads in terms of how to protect their inventions, which range from biopharma to intelligent treatments, and image recognition for diagnosis just to name a few. In the meantime, in-house intellectual property teams can resort to either patents or trade secrets.
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Universities seek to ease the technology licensing process [Ed: If taxpayers and tuition fees funded it, they ought not pursue patents in the first place, let alone pass these to trolls]
Fifteen prestigious universities have agreed to jointly license the patents they own in three physical sciences fields, aiming to become a one-stop shop where large tech companies can negotiate agreements to use their intellectual property.
The University Technology Licensing Program (UTLP) began operations in September 2020, when the University of California’s Los Angeles and Berkeley campuses signed on. They were joined by Caltech and Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, Princeton, and Yale Universities along with SUNY Binghamton and the Universities of Illinois, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Southern California.
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Opposition – an underestimated weapon [Ed: Opposing unjust monopolies isn't a weapon and justice is not a war. This is a gross reversal of narratives to make victims seem like aggressors.]
In the context of protecting trademark rights, an opposition is an underestimated tool to stop infringing activities from the beginning – even before infringing products and services appear on the market. The negotiation leverage for an amicable solution is much higher than in trademark litigation and the cost risk for the trademark owner is significantly lower.
Significant differences are seen in opposition systems around the globe. This chapter looks at the German, European and US systems with regard to formalities, proceedings, remedies, costs and recommend appropriate strategies from the opponent’s perspective. A good strategy and necessary preparations are key to success.
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How to manage your patent portfolio [Ed: No, there is no such thing as "intellectual property rights" ()several different lies in that term) and monopolies are not a "portfolio"; it's rather revealing who these people front for...]
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Amarin Pharma, Inc. v. Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., Docket No. 21-02024 (Fed. Cir. 2021) is up on appeal again. The district court found Amarin’s asserted patent claims obvious and the Federal Circuit affirmed that holding in a R.36 affirmance without opinion.
Following the Federal Circuit’s decision, an ad-hoc group of doctors, patients, and Amarin stock holders (collectively known as EPA Drug Initiative II) moved to intervene in the lawsuit and asked the court to vacate its judgment based upon “multiple fatal statistical errors in analyzing and interpreting the prior art.”
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One reason that I expect EPADI to lose is that it had requested permission to file an amicus brief in the original appeal as had the Biotechnology Innovation Organization (BIO). The Federal Circuit denied EPADI’s request but permitted BIO’s.
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Congratulations Judge O’Malley [Ed: Better than Dennis Crouch's race-baiting against CAFC judges whose decisions he did not like]
I’m writing about Judge O’Malley because she has announced her plans to retire on March 11, 2022. These future-retirement announcements are designed to provide President Biden time to name a successor. Barring other changes, this will be Biden’s second nominee following Judge Cunningham’s recent Senate confirmation.
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IPR proceedings have two major decision points. Institution: After IPR petition is filed, the PTO Director determines whether or not to institute the IPR. The statute provides the director with discretionary authority on whether or not to institute the IPR, but does create a threshold — requiring that the petition show at least “a reasonable likelihood that the petitioner would prevail.” 35 U.S.C. 314. Also, the PTO Director has delegated their institution authority to the PTAB, and so a PTAB panel actually makes the decision. Final Decision: If the IPR is instituted then the PTAB is charged with holding a trial and reaching a final decision “with respect to the patentability of any patent claim challenged.” On the other hand, if institution is denied, the case is over and no appeal is permitted. “The determination by the Director whether to institute an inter partes review under this section shall be final and nonappealable.” 35 U.S.C. 314(d). Note here that “nonappealable” has been generally interpreted as ordinarily not appealable. See Cuozzo Speed Technologies, LLC v. Lee, 136 S. Ct. 2131 (2016) and Thryv, Inc. v. Click-To-Call
Technologies, LP, 140 S. Ct. 1367 (2020).
With NHK-Fintiv, PTAB panels are able to use their discretionary authority to deny institution in situations involving parallel litigation guided by a six-factor test that generally dance around the overarching question of whether “instituting a trial would be an inefficient use of Board resources.”
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Three recent Utility Decisions at the PTAB [Ed: Dennis Crouch is still concern-trolling PTAB, in pursuit of patent maximalist agenda (maximising lawsuits). He’s sponsored by a litigation giant.]
Utility Doctrine does not get much use in patent prosecution. Still, examiners do reject claims on utility grounds. The following are three recent PTAB decisions that all reverse examiner utility rejections. In Horne, focus is whether a partially-built tool has any utility; In Zauderer, the question is whether a theoretical rocket ship design has any credible utility; and in Grajcar the question focuses on whether data was provided to support a sex-selection method.
Ex parte Horne, APPEAL 2020-004000, 2021 WL 2788193 (2021)
Applicant claimed a saw blade blank without cutting teeth and the examiner rejected the claims as lacking utility since it was just a work-in-process. On appeal, the PTAB reversed — finding that creation of the blank is a useful step in the blade manufacture process. “Contrary to the Examiner’s suggestion, the utility requirement of § 101 does not require an invention to be a ‘final product’ made to sell to end users.”
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Grajcar’s application claims a method of sex-selection of tilapia using 440-460 nm wavelength light (this is blue/violet). The examiner rejected the inventio as lacking utility since the patentee provided no experimental data proving that it actually works. On appeal, the PTAB reversed — finding that the specification did include a sample of 12 larvae treated with 450 nm light and resulted in 9 males, 1 intersex, and 2 female. The particular claim is directed to “selecting sex”, which is seemingly more general than selecting males in particular. In the appeal the PTAB interpreted the claim as selecting males, thus resolving the dispute.
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Here, the CAFC has vacated a PTAB IPR decision based upon a sua sponte claim construction. The court found that the agency did not provide the notice and opportunity to respond required by the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).
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The UK High Court has held that an insulin pump product owned by Roche Diabetes Care does not infringe a patent of US medical device company Insulet (case no: HP-2020-000026). It also found the patent invalid for added matter, obviousness and novelty. Insulet launched proceedings against competitor Roche in 2018, seeking an injunction after the latter launched its own insulin pump product.
An insulin pump targets type one diabetics, who are typically unable to produce insulin from the pancreas following a rise in blood glucose concentration. Left untreated, high glucose levels can lead to hyperglycaemia, which can have toxic effects. Insulin pumps are a relatively recent invention, with the majority of diabetics using self-administration injector pens at regular intervals throughout the day.
However, the pump offers a continuous insulin delivery to the patient, as well as moderating insulin flows if necessary. They are gaining in popularity in the UK, especially among children and those with more limited physical capacity.
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There’s a big “See I told ya so” waiting for you toward the end of this post as far as patent licensing to car makers is concerned, but let’s look at this news in a logical sequence of steps:
Nokia just sent out its earnings release for the second quarter (and the first half) of 2021. Irrespectively of how strongly I’ve sometimes disagreed with their positions in litigation, I always read their statements and have an active subscription to their news releases.
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It’s not just highly unlikely but even unthinkable that Nokia, despite getting its way in the largest-scale and highest-profile automotive SEP dispute ever, would have changed course and granted an exhaustive and otherwise unrestricted license to an automotive supplier. The most plausible scenario is that after Daimler’s defeat someone else decided that hold-out was just going to cost a ton of legal fees, for nothing.
You can’t argue with success. Or, as investors often say, the trend is your friend.
If it were up to me, I’d prefer Avanci and all of its members (as some do) to offer an exhaustive component-level license at the chipset, network access device (NAD), and telecommunications control unit (TCU) level. But I don’t get to decide. Marconi, the company behind Avanci, can do only what its members are able to agree upon. Apart from a few hold-outs, car-level patent licensing is now uncontroversial. It’s a fact of life.
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Unified’s Portal now includes Ex Parte Re-examinations. Users now can find up-to-date information on any given case, and search by case by number, patent number, or by party.
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Software Patents
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On July 27, 2021, just three weeks after Unified filed an ex parte reexamination, the USPTO granted Unified’s request, finding substantial new questions of patentability on the challenged claims of U.S. Patent 8,103,213. Formerly owned by the Nokia Corporation, the ‘213 patent is currently owned by WSOU Investments, LLC and has been asserted against NEC in the Western District of Texas.
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Intellectual property (IP) officials in South Africa have made history in a landmark decision to award a patent that names an artificial intelligence (AI) as the inventor.
The patent—which was filed by an international team of lawyers and researchers led by the University of Surrey’s, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, Ryan Abbott —is for a food container based on fractal geometry. This container was designed and created by an AI called DABUS (“device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”).
Historically, an “inventor” of a patent had to be a human being, although the ownership of that patent is commonly given to the company that employs the inventor. While patent law in many jurisdictions is very specific in how it defines an inventor, the DABUS team is arguing that the status quo is not fit for purpose in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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AI Invention Gets Patent In a World First; Sets Precedent for IP Laws Everywhere [Ed: No, it does not “Set Precedent for IP [sic] Laws Everywhere” because that’s just the nature of different places having different laws; and patent maximalists are jubilant about another blow to the credibility of a crooked system]
In the world’s first intellectual property (IP), officials in South Africa awarded a patent to an invention made by an artificial intelligence (AI) system – creating a landmark decision that could steer the course of IP laws everywhere.
The AI system did not file the groundbreaking patent, but by an international team of lawyers and researchers led by Ryan Abbott, Professor of Law and Health Sciences at the University of Surrey in England. South African IP officers awarded the patent for a food container design based on fractal geometry, the design of which was designed and developed by an AI system called DABUS, or “Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience).
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The patent office in South Africa on Wednesday issued the world’s first patent for an invention created by artificial intelligence, furthering a fight over recognition for such patents in other countries.
The Companies and Intellectual Property Commission, an agency under the country’s Department of Trade, Industry and Competition, issued the patent to Stephen Thaler, who runs a company called Imagination Engines in Missouri and who is behind another invention, called a device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience, or DABUS.
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South Africa issues world’s first patent naming AI as inventor [Ed: It's not an inventor at all, that's just patent maximalism at work, trying to make conflicts and legal wars because they profit from chaos]
In this article written by Intellectual Property Magazine, Mathys & Squire partner Jeremy Smith provides his commentary in response to the recent news that the South African patent office (Companies and Intellectual Property Commission Department of Trade and Industry (CIPC)) has issued the world’s first patent for an invention that lists an artificial intelligence (AI) as the inventor and the AI’s owner as the owner of the patent.
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The overturned ruling bucks the trend we’ve previously seen in the US and UK.
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In a landmark decision, an Australian court has set a groundbreaking precedent, deciding artificial intelligence (AI) systems can be legally recognised as an inventor in patent applications.
That might not sound like a big deal, but it challenges a fundamental assumption in the law: that only human beings can be inventors.
The AI machine called DABUS is an “artificial neural system” and its designs have set off a string of debates and court battles across the globe.
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The patent—which was filed by an international team of lawyers and researchers led by the University of Surrey’s, Professor of Law and Health Sciences, Ryan Abbott —is for a food container based on fractal geometry. This container was designed and created by an AI called DABUS (“device for the autonomous bootstrapping of unified sentience”).
Historically, an “inventor” of a patent had to be a human being, although the ownership of that patent is commonly given to the company that employs the inventor. While patent law in many jurisdictions is very specific in how it defines an inventor, the DABUS team is arguing that the status quo is not fit for purpose in the Fourth Industrial Revolution.
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Trademarks
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A potentially important product design trademark case is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court involving those chocolate covered bready-sticks. Ezaki Glico Kabushiki Kaisha v. Lotte International America Corp., Docket No. 20-1817 (Supreme Court 2021).
Glico’s Pocky product has been sold since 1966 and are apparently popular. Lotte’s Pepero’s are a knock-off version. Glico sued for trademark infringement, asserting Glico’s trademark rights in the product design of chocolate-covered elongated rod biscuits. Glico registered this particular mark back in 1989. Reg. No. 1,527,208.
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Recent research indicates that the eco-cosmetics segment in Poland grew by 39% between July 2019 and June 2020 while the product range of this product group grew by almost 50% over the year. Despite the pandemic, the market for organic food also grew by about 20%, i.e. 3.5 times more than the average for the entire food basket. The media and the advertising industry have to keep up with the change in consumer behaviour. Eco-campaigns, apart from the products themselves, additionally refer to values such as care for the environment, ecology or healthy lifestyle. The opposite of natural media is the so-called “greenwashing”, which is unjustified building of an ecological image and misleading consumers about the origin or characteristics of products.
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On January 1st, 2022, the new Regulation 2018/848 of the European Parliament and of the Council will come into force, which will apply in the European Union, including Poland. It will also affect the amendment of the Polish Organic Farming Act. The regulation defines the rules regarding organic production and the related certification, the use of labels referring to organic production such as BIO (biological) and EKO (ecological) in labelling and advertising materials.
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Counsel say broad trademark specifications are back on the cards but that brands should still be cautious
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In-house and private practice sources say the latest ruling in Sky v SkyKick, which limits the ability to invalidate broad trademarks based on bad faith, accounts for the difficulty brands face when trying to predict future product launches.
In a decision handed down on Monday, July 26, the England and Wales Court of Appeal reversed a High Court decision that had said some trademark specifications of media company Sky were too broad and had been filed in bad faith.
However, the finding that cloud management company SkyKick infringed Sky’s trademarks still stands, as does the High Court’s rejection of Sky’s passing off claims.
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The 63% increase in filings, largely being driven by Chinese applicants, has forced brand owners to double down on organisation and due diligence
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The Fashion Law Blog published a follow-up concerning the Puma vs Nike battle over Nike’s trade mark application for ‘footware’. After having opposed the Nike’s application in the US for being generic and descriptive, Puma has now withdrawn its opposition. Nike’s application for registration is also pending in several other countries, including Canada, Australia, and India.
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The recent decision of the German Constitutional Court concerning the constitutionality of the UPC has attracted wide commentary in the the patent blogosphere [see, e.g., IPKat posts here and earlier here]. Juve Patent has now featured an opinion piece concerning the (uncertain) future of the UPC.
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Puma and Nike appear as though they may have come to a resolution in their battle over “footware,” the trademark that Nike has been angling to register in the U.S. and beyond. On the heels of a win for Nike in May when a court in the United Kingdom dismissed Puma’s appeal (after a UK Intellectual Property Office hearing officer rejected its bid to block the registration of Nike’s mark), thereby, paving the way for Nike’s application for the “footware” mark to proceed in the registration process, counsel for Puma alerted a domestic trademark body that it was withdrawing its challenge against Nike’s “footware” mark in the U.S.
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In addition to its genericness claim, Puma argued that Nike’s mark is also ineligible for registration because the Nike is far from the only party in the business of selling products that “combine footwear, hardware and/or software technologies.” In fact, Puma claims that it started “manufacturing and selling footwear incorporating computer technology at least as early as 1986,” while other companies, such as Under Armour, Altra, and Samsung, are similarly offering up tech-centric footwear products.
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The CJEU’s conclusion may or may not be factually (and legally) correct, but given the worldwide attention to soccer and soccer players perhaps it may be a plausible “inference” and justifies a finding that MESSI and MASSI are not confusingly similar. Yet, it really seemed an exceptional decision, quite unlikely to be extended or applied to other cases, especially for identical names.
Well, we were all wrong. Because, of course, with the decision T‑368/20 of 16 June 2021, the General Court set the same standard for Ronaldo’s own trademark.
NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Case T‑368/20 did not deal with Ronaldo, but rather with Ms Miley Cyrus, who may perhaps be a talented musician, but certainly is neither Messi, nor Ronaldo.
In short, MILEY CYRUS was filed for various goods and services in classes lasses 9, 16, 28 and 41 and got an opposition based on a stylized mark CYRUS in classes 20 and 41.
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As also (and regrettably in vain) argued by EUIPO, since neither ‘miley’ nor ‘cyrus’ is a common first name or surname, this implies that the relevant public who will identify the mark applied for, MILEY CYRUS, as referring to a famous singer, is also likely to perceive the surname alone as the short version of the full name, thus identifying the same person, i.e. a classic case of reverse confusion.
The refence to the earlier BARBARA BECKER judgment (C-51/09 P) in para. 33 of the MILEY CIRUS judgment is unconvincing, precisely because “Becker” is an extremely common last name, while “Cyrus” clearly isn’t.
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Copyrights
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The first case (4 Ob 40/21t – in German) relates to the operation of an online video recording device. The defendant was offering an internet protocol television (“IPTV”) service to business clients (e.g., network operators, hotels and stadiums). The IPTV service included two relevant features: (1) an online videorecorder allowing the clients’ customers to record individual programs; and (2) a replay function allowing the customers to watch television programs for up to seven days on demand, if they chose to activate this function for an individual television channel. The IPTV service included TV programs created and broadcasted by the Claimant.
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The first question seeks to distinguish this case from C-265/16 VCAST/RTI (Katpost here) and the second question from C-527/15 Stichting Brein (Filmspeler) (Katpost here). After legal analysis, the referring court indicated that it is inclined to find in favor of the copyright holder on both questions (ie, that the operation of the online video recorder constitutes a communication to the public and thus copyright infringement under the InfoSoc Directive). However, the court was of the view that the case law lacks sufficient clarity to enable it to answer the questions without referral to the CJEU.
The second case (4 Ob 44/21f – in German) relates to an online streaming platform aimed at émigrés from the territory of former Yugoslavia. The defendant operated the platform based on license agreements with TV channel operators. Under these agreements, the defendant was obliged to block the streaming signal for certain shows in certain territories. The claimant is the owner of the copyright in several TV shows broadcast on the relevant TV channels. It claims that circumventing the defendant’s geo-blocking measures is relatively easy, the defendant is aware of customers using its service outside the licensed territory, and it fails to prevent such illicit use.
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