EPO is like a monarchy
Summary: Even this year, or as recently as months ago, the EPO made it evident that it honours Benoît Battistelli, who left his French buddy António Campinos in charge of the EPO, perpetuating all the same corruption while adding more to it
Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup!
We had a great week in the world of Linux releases with a brand new Makulu Shift Ubuntu Variant, Nitrux Linux 2021.10.29 and, Elive 3.8.24.
Have a great week and enjoy it!
I often see people and companies moving their workloads to the cloud. Speaking with them, they explain that the cloud is cheaper, more flexible, and more reliable than their current infrastructure. To further increase investment return, they often target a specific (single) cloud to reduce management costs and complexity.
By itself, this trend seems a very reasonable one. The risk is that, sometimes, people do not consider the less immediate risks around this move. There are many of those risks, and if there is an appetite for it, I’ll be talking further about the other dangers, but now I would like to focus on a specific one: the risk of a shutdown.
I define the “risk of a Cloud shutdown” as the potential risk that all resources of a single customer go offline. Major events such as data center going down or a global BGP failure can create downtime, but we are not talking about those since those would affect much more than a single customer.
Today we are looking at Makulu Shift, based on Ubuntu. It comes with Linux Kernel 5.11, based on Ubuntu 20.04, Gnome 3.38, and uses about 71.5GB of ram when idling. Enjoy!
In this video, we are looking at Makulu Shift Ubuntu Variant. Enjoy!
You’ve seen an email address, you think you understand how they work but you don’t even remotely know how mistaken you are and today I go over why writing a regex to fully handle emails is nearly impossible
Reflections on Python.
It's been calm, and I have no excuse to add an extra rc, so here we
are, with v5.15 pushed out, and the merge window starting tomorrow.
Which is going to be a bit inconvenient for me, since I also have some
conference travel coming up. But it's only a couple of days and I'll
have my laptop with me. Sometimes the release timing works out, and
sometimes it doesn't..
Anyway, the last week of 5.15 was mainly networking and gpu fixes,
with some random sprinkling of other things (a few btrfs reverts, some
kvm updates, minor other fixes here and there - a few architecture
fixes, couple of tracing, small driver fixes etc). Full shortlog
appended.
This release may have started out with some -Werror pain, but it
calmed down fairly quickly and on the whole 5.15 was fair small and
calm. Let's hope for more of the same - without Werror issues this
time - for the upcoming merge window.
Linus
Highlights of Linux 5.15 include a brand new NTFS file system implementation from Parangon Software that’s fully functional and supports all NTFS versions up to 3.1, an in-kernel SMB3 server called ksmbd, Btrfs now supports fs-verity file integrity assurance and ID-mapped mounts, as well as DAMON (Data Access MONitor) for monitoring the memory access pattern of user-space processes.
The code name for this release has been set to “Trick or Treat”.
Significant features in this release include: the realtime preemption locking code, descriptorless files for io_uring, BPF timers, the removal of mandatory file-locking support, the ksmbd SMB filesystem server (but see this article), printk() indexing, the process_mrelease() system call, The DAMON memory-management optimization system, the ntfs3 filesystem implementation, and much more. See the KernelNewbies 5.15 page for more information.
Back in September at the end of the Linux 5.15 merge window was our Linux 5.15 feature overview but given the time since then and that the Linux 5.15 stable kernel will likely be released this evening, here is a recap of the most interesting changes in this new kernel version.
Linux 5.15 will be released by tonight unless Linus Torvalds decides to be conservative with an additional release candidate, which would push the final release back to next Sunday. In any case, here is a look at the most interesting changes and new features from our perspective with this next kernel…
Linus Torvalds went ahead and released Linux 5.15 today on Halloween rather than delaying the kernel for another week.
Linux 5.15 has many prominent changes including the introduction of DAMON, the new NTFS file-system driver, initial Xe HPG and DG2/Alchemist support code, Zen 3 APU temperature monitoring, and much more.
What better way to kickstart a brand new month than with a brand new Linux kernel.
Yes, Linux 5.15 is now officially released.
Announcing the new kernel’s arrival on the Linux Kernel mailing list Linux founder Linus Trovalds [sic] writes:
“The last week of 5.15 was mainly networking and gpu fixes, with some random sprinkling of other things (a few btrfs reverts, some kvm updates, minor other fixes here and there – a few architecture fixes, couple of tracing, small driver fixes etc)”, adding that “…on the whole 5.15 was fair small and calm (sic)”.
One of the keystones of any operating system is a properly configured firewall for complete system security. UFW (Uncomplicated Firewall) is installed on Ubuntu operating systems default; however, it is not enabled. One of the great benefits of UFW is its simplicity, user-friendly and easy-to-use command line, making it great for beginners in Linux to the most advanced power users.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install and set up UFW Firewall on either Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa Desktop or Server using the command terminal.
Title of this blog post isn’t a collection of every Kubernetes related buzzword I could think of. It’s a collection of technologies that went into creating an automated, resilient and scalable WordPress setup.
The AUR (Arch User Repository) is one of the most alluring features of Arch Linux, and its derivative Linux distributions like Manjaro.
Normally, new software would be downloaded via pacman on Arch and Manjaro. When software isn’t available in official repositories, users can turn to the AUR, where they’re likely to find what they’re looking for.
Our homelab runs on dedicated hardware, therefore there is no Cloud provider cost involved in order to run it.
The cost of electricity is all there is to it. The average homelab power consumption is approximatelly 80W.
Monthly, this works out as follows: (((80W * 24h) / 1000) * £0.16/kWh * 365days) / 12months = £9.34 (~13$).
Apache Module mod_ssl is available to install for getting SSL support in our HTTP server. Here we let you know how to enable mod_ssl & mod_http2 for Apache webserver on Almalinux or Rocky Linux 8 (RHEL based).
To get SSL v3 and TLS v1.x support on Apache, this article is here that helps in generating the required SSL certificate including the associated private key.
We may want to organize the result of an Ubuntu operation in a specific way. Perhaps we should avoid bloated results and present information in a concise style. The commands echo and printf are also constructed. Printf provides for the creation of a formatting string and offers a non-zero quit status when it fails. Whereas echo normally leaves with a 0 status and typically outputs inputs headed by the end of line character upon this standard result. The “printf” gives you more options for the output format than the “echo”. Throughout this brief lesson, we will look at how to style the results of the terminal using the echo and printf instructions on Ubuntu 20.04 Linux system.
The sed stands for stream editor that is used for basic editing operations on a text that comes from a file or on an input that is directly passed to sed from another command. Like its inputting criteria, sed can process an input file and give output to another program (as it takes input from other programs directly). It can be used to track the same word that is used in a document in different ways and the users can set them for better understanding. As the foundation of sed is based on a text editor but it can be used to write complex scripts also.
This article will cover a guide on using the “gdu” command line utility in Linux. This tool can be used to analyze free as well used space on any storage device connected to your Linux system. Written in Go programming language, gdu claims to be fast at analyzing solid state drives. According to a benchmark provided on its GitHub repository, it can analyze an entire disk faster than other similar tools.
Environment variables are a collection of dynamic specified values kept inside the machine that has been utilized by programs running in terminals or subshells in Ubuntu and Linux platforms. The environment variable, in basic terms, is an attribute with a title and a value. Environment variables involve changing the way a system functions as well as the behavior of the device’s programs. The environment variable can hold data such as the regular word processor or search engine, the route to executable documents, the machine locale, and keypad layout preferences, among other things.
You may find yourself in many situations where you have to split string values into arrays or other data structures while working on a bash script in a Linux system. Here, you have to clear that bash doesn’t provide us with the built-in split function to split any string. But there is always an alternative to such problems. Hence, we will be using the delimiters to convert or split some strings into an array. Let’s start looking at some examples within Ubuntu 20.04. Open the shell terminal first using the “Ctrl+Alt+T” on the desktop.
VLC Media Player doesn’t need any introduction it has been around for a very long time to run media files on almost all operating systems. Here we learn how to install a VLC media player on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8 (RHEL based Linux).
VLC is available for Linux, Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. It is an open-source application and can play files of all important audio and video formats. A double click is enough, alternatively you can load files into the VLC interface using drag & drop or tap a video DVD using the menu bar command.
The users can easily switch ON Subtitles and lyrics, if available along with the preferred language for films in VLC. The VLC media player can also be used as a streaming client for various Internet streams – such as YouTube videos and the like. With a little bit of skill, you can also use this function to download media such as the aforementioned YouTube videos from the network and save them locally. If the format does not yet fit, you can convert it with the VLC media player and extract the audio track from videos in order to save them as an MP3 file, for example.
Apache is the most widely used and popular open-source web server on the Internet. It can be flexibly configured and expanded using a large number of modules. Here we learn how to install Apache webserver on AlmaLinux or Rocky Linux 8 using the command line.
Most of the time we use Apache web server in combination with MySQL and PHP or Perl or Python to create a LAMP server ( Linux, Apache, MySQL, and P such as PHP, Perl, or Python) for running various CMS and other web applications.
The Linux system contains many options to be set in it by a user. One of the very well-known and useful groups of commands is “Set builtin”. The Set Built-in has many flags to set any environment variables in Bash with its simple commands. Today, we will discuss and implement some examples to see different Set Built-in commands in Ubuntu 20.04 Linux operating system. Start by logging in from your system first. Open your shell terminal using the “Ctrl+Alt+T” shortcut key on the desktop. To get information regarding the “Set Built-in” command, use the “help” command along with the “set” keyword in your terminal as shown.
Samba is a utility present in Linux that allows sharing of folders and printers across different operating systems over a network. It means you can access the folders present in Linux in one system from another system having Windows using Samba.
In this tutorial you will learn about the Samba server in detail; how to install and configure the Samba server in Ubuntu Linux, along with different cases of its use and different issues that might arise.
In Bash scripts, there seem to be a variety of ways to accept data from the user. Allowing participants to enter input, on the other hand, might cause some issues. The major difficulty is data integrity, which necessitates taking into consideration all potential inputs. Creating a multiple-choice panel for the Bash code is a simple way around all of this. To use this approach, you may construct a simple, predefined set of choices from which the user can select. In this brief tutorial, we’ll look at how to make a basic numerous option menu within Bash scripts to use a select structure and case clauses via the Ubuntu 20.04 system terminal.
In mathematics, the modulo operator is widely known to determine the remainder of two values upon division. This mathematical operator can also be used in the bash script. Therefore, we will see how a modulo operator can be used in bash with different ways to get the remainder. Let’s start by logging in from the Ubuntu 20.04 system. Try “Ctrl+Alt+T” to launch the shell terminal on the Ubuntu desktop. Let’s have a few examples.
You may have encountered many situations when you have to quit your bash script upon some inconvenience. There are many methods to quit the bash script, i.e., quit while writing a bash script, while execution, or at run time. One of the many known methods to exit a bash script while writing is the simple shortcut key, i.e., “Ctrl+X”. While at run time, you can exit the code using “Ctrl+Z”. This guide will show how the batch script can be quitted using the different exit clauses while executing. Let’s get started by logging in from the Ubuntu 20.04 system first and opening the shell using “Ctrl+Alt+T”.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install KDE Plasma on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, KDE Plasma is one of the most popular Desktop Environments available for Linux Desktop users. KDE dedicate based on creating a free and user-friendly computer experience by offering advanced graphical desktop and a wide variety of applications for entertainment, learning, communication e.t.c
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 KDE Plasma Desktop Environment on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
IonCube is a code encryption tool, created in 2003. It was introduced to protect codes written in PHP language so that an unlicensed user could not view, change or run the file. It secures the file through the encryption/decryption method.
So one thing I’ve been doing past four months is the porting of Formats KCM, but now the scope is no longer restricted in only porting. Alone the process, first the old KCM design isn’t that mobile friendly so I did a re-design. And then Nate pointed out that the Formats KCM is in conflicted with Language KCM, which leads to the merging of Language and Formats KCM. Also the post I made eariler about locales in Linux, that also needs to be addressed. It’s still some work to be done, namely locale generation and relevent package installation via PackageKit. I really want to get this merged before Plasma 5.24, the soft freeze of which happens at 30/12/2021.
While I bounce around from one Linux distribution to the next like a hyper-active flea on its sixth cup of coffee, it’s not very often I switch from one web browser to another. I used Opera almost exclusively for about a decade (from around 2002-2010), then mostly used QupZilla from then on. The QupZilla browser got rebranded to Falkon shortly before it was put out to pasture. Along the way I’ve occasionally used other browsers, either for testing purposes or when working with a client, or just to see what “this new Chromium thing is everyone keeps talking about”, but I tend to be a creature of habit when it comes to browsers. I might run Firefox or Chrome for a week, but then I’m back to whatever was working for me before, often because I’ve grown accustomed to shortcut keys or having my bookmarks sorted a certain way.
[...]
Earlier I mentioned Brave blocks advertisements and tracking by default. It actually goes a step further than this. Brave allows the user to right-click on ads they do see to hide them in the future, and it blocks invisible trackers on websites. It then goes even further and randomizes its own fingerprint.
Browser fingerprinting is a way of collecting data a browser leaks, such as its user agent, extension information, version, and supported plugins. This allows websites to uniquely identify most users, even with cookies disabled and the user’s IP address changed. Brave works around this by randomizing its fingerprint in a way to mask its users. In theory it should be difficult for a website to tell one Brave user from another. According to Digital Trends, Brave was the first mainstream browser to pass the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Cover Your Tracks test.
These features cover my comments on advertising and tracking, but what is BAT? BAT is short for Basic Attention Tokens. While Brave defaults to hiding ads from the user, we have the option of enabling ads from the browser itself. Brave will optionally pop-up a notification in the corner of the window from time to time asking if we wish to see an ad (the frequency of these notifications can be adjusted). If we click the button to see an ad we can earn tokens. These tokens are a form of cryptocurrency which can then be sent to participating websites as donations (or tips) for their content. We can choose which websites get our tokens and the sites can then cash in to pay for hosting or paying contributors.
[...]
The Brave browser hits most of the points I want from my primary portal to the Internet. It’s quick, open source, fairly flexible, and it has been surprisingly stable. It uses a medium level of memory and CPU compared to the other browsers I tried and it’s fairly easy to set up on multiple platforms (GNU/Linux desktops, mobile phones, and so on).
I greatly appreciate the browser’s privacy defaults, the fact it ships with Tor as a built-in option, its private mode, and randomized browser fingerprint. The ability to right-click on unwanted elements of a web page and hide them is a great bonus and allows the user to hide ads or other items we do not wish to see on a website.
The one complaint I have about Brave is that it tends to make me switch between using the keyboard and mouse occasionally. This is fairly common, it’s something I also need to do with Chromium and Firefox. However, I have been spoiled in the past by browsers like Falkon which make it easy to set almost any action, including accessing specific bookmarks, as a keyboard shortcut. Often times I didn’t need to touch a mouse when using Falkon and I find the transition back and forth slows me down a little. Over time I’ve been learning ways to substitute in shortcuts to speed up my work on Brave, but it would be nice if this was a more naturally occurring feature.
One final thing I appreciate about Brave is that it feels like it is intended to be a web browser and just a web browser. While we can add extra extensions and enable BAT ads, by default Brave doesn’t try to work with mail, or nag me to set up an account to synchronize my passwords. It just offers a portal to websites and this is primarily what I was looking to find.
As many of you know, global supply chains are in a state of flux as we (hopefully) emerge from the shadow of the COVID-19 pandemic. In our own industry, semiconductors are in high demand, and in short supply: the upsurge of demand for electronic products for home working and entertainment during the pandemic has descended into panic buying, as companies try to secure the components that they need to build their products.
Over the past week, I’ve seen quite a few nice Halloween-themed artworks made with free/libre software. Here are my personal picks of the ones made with Blender and Krita.
The Motoko programming language has a built-in data type for optional values, named ?t with values null and ?v (for v : t); this is the equivalent of Haskell’s Maybe, Ocaml’s option or Rust’s Option. In this post, I explain how Motoko represents such optional values (almost) without allocation.
Pragma is a compiler directive that allows us to add additional information to the compiler so that it can compile the code effectively. This information, once added, is not then in our hands to control it and can change the details of compilation. This directive is used to access compiler-related specific processor extensions.
[Kevin Norman] got himself a smart body scale with the intention of logging data for his own analysis, but discovered that extracting data from the device was anything but easy. It turns out that the only way to access data from his scale is by viewing it in a mobile app. Screen-scraping is a time-honored method of pulling data from uncooperative systems, so [Kevin] committed to regularly taking a full-height screenshot from the app and using optical character recognition (OCR) to get the numbers, but making that work was a surprisingly long process full of dead ends.
In this tutorial, you will learn about lists and data frames. Also, we discussed different list conversion methods to the data frame in python language. The list in python is the most vital data structure. The important thing about the list is that the list items are not forcibly the same data type, and all the string operations are equally applied on the list data types. Come let’s talk about the data frames.
In python, panda’s library is used for data handling and analysis. Pandas Dataframe is a 2D size-changeable and varied tabular data constructor with marked axes. In Dataframe, knowledge is ranged in a tabular way in columns and rows. Pandas Dataframe contains 3 main essentials, i.e., data, columns, and rows. We will implement our scenarios in Spyder Compiler so let’s get started.
In Python, sets and lists both contain collections of objects, but there are significant differences between these two. If we talk about sets, they are valuable for executing a massive range of intersections and unions. On the other hand, lists provide those operations that help you to find duplicated items. In other words, a list contains identical items, while a set contains exceptional values. Another distinct quality is that the list uses square brackets, while the set uses curly brackets. Keep in mind that a dictionary in Python also uses curly braces. The common thing in sets and lists is that they hold strings, floats, integers, or other data types. So, if you have a set of elements in Python, you can also make a set of strings in python.
In python language, writing or reading files is a significant functionality. If you want to read or write files, then computer languages provide input or output libraries with built-in approaches that allow the formation, modification, reading, or writing of data from the files. Python has no exemption. Python also provides various in-built techniques to perform file operations. In Python, the I/O module is used for file handling.
Today, our focus is python writing lists to a file. We elaborate the whole process of python write list by applying different operations with the help of Spyder Compiler in Windows 10. Since there are numerous ways of python writing lists, we also discuss different example codes to elaborate on them further.
Several times when programming, a programmer needs to remove the very last item from a list. The pop() method eliminates and returns the final item of the list if there is no index. This function returns the element you deleted, permitting you to see what variations were made to your list. The index of the element you have to remove is the only parameter to pop(). You might opt to remove a particular item from a list. Assume you are creating a program to keep track of the books accessible in a bookstore. When a book is taken out, you may choose to remove it from the set of possible books and return it. Pop is a built-in method in the Python language that may be used to eliminate an item from a list. The pop() method returns the removed item after removing an element from a given place in a list.
This article will look at the pop() function in Python, how it’s utilized, and what parameters it accepts. Then, to demonstrate how the function can be used with lists, we will look at a few examples.
Python List is a changeable and ordered sequence, as we all know about this fact. It may contain both heterogeneous and homogeneous elements. In Python, it is a widely used data structure. We occasionally need to know the length of a list to traverse it or perform other operations on it. Len() is a built-in function that returns the total number of elements in a list, sequence, arrays, dictionary, or other data structure. The length of a given list is returned by the len() method, which accepts a list as an input. In Python, the len() function is one of the most popular methods for determining the size of a provided list.
This part will look at the various methods for determining the length of a list in Python. The length of the list refers to determining the size of the list’s size or the number of items.
Note: All three examples demonstrated in this guide will use the “temp.py” file that is created in the Spyder IDE tool. The operating system used for the implementation of these three examples is “Windows 10”. The choice of operating system and compiler are all dependent on user convenience.
Learning a new programming language like Python becomes effortless if you have a comprehensive roadmap detailing which concepts to learn as a beginner and how to progress further to reach the next milestone. Even intermediate programmers should frequently brush up on their basics to build a solid foundation for themselves.
By the end, you’ll find yourself stuck to your computer writing Python code using the fundamental commands enlisted in this article. We’ll also discuss how you can set up a Python environment on your machine to be able to write and execute Python code.
A fundamental method to search and replace a string is using regular expressions. RegEx is powerful in finding patterns, filtering, and more.
In this guide, we will discuss various ways to manipulate strings in Ruby. We will cover how to perform string substation, insertion, and replacement.
String interpolation refers to the process of adding placeholders that reference other values in a string object. The values interpolated into a string are evaluated to their corresponding values. String interpolation can be seen as a form of template injection.
In this guide, we will discuss how to interpolate strings in the Ruby programming language.
Strings are an array of one or more alphanumerical characters and symbols. It is almost a guarantee you are going to use strings in your programs. They allow you to accept input from the users and display information to the users.
This tutorial will help you understand how to create strings, print strings, and string concatenation.
Strings are a fundamental building block in programming, and it is nearly impossible to imagine a functional program that doesn’t use strings.
This guide will look at various ways we can reverse a string in the Ruby programming language.
In Ruby and other programming languages, arrays allow you to store related information in a list and manage them by a single variable.
Once you have an array, you can manipulate the elements stored in it, such as creating, reading, updating, and deleting elements.
In this short guide, we will explore various ways to find elements in an array.
Arrays are a collection of ordered items. Arrays are crucial in many programming languages because they provide flexibility, performance, and refactored code when used appropriately.
An individual item in the array is an array’s element. Each element is identifiable by an index which is a value that describes the element’s position in the collection.
In Ruby, the index of elements in the array starts at 0 from left to right. Hence, the first element in the array is at an index of 0.
Last week’s blog article was about counterpart clauses, and IP Draughts’ preference to omit them, in the interests of focussing on key issues.
The positive reactions of some readers have prompted IP Draughts to think more generally about the techniques he uses when trying to make his contracts user-friendly.
It is important, in IP Draughts’ view, to draft the contract in a clear, accurate, concise and consistent way. But today’s article is not about the wording of individual clauses.
But what has become evident recently is that most of these genomes were in one way or another incomplete, due typically because there were regions of this or that genome that were resistant to accurate sequencing or come other biologic idiosyncrasy. The most recent example of this reminder of the complexity of biological organisms is our old friend the domestic cat, which built (as most of the new studies do) on the earlier genomic elucidations. In this case, the earlier study in question was published in 2014, when an international effort led by Stephen J. O’Brien at the Oceanographic Center, Nova Southeastern University, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida reported the complete genomic sequencing of the domestic cat, Felix catus. The report, entitled “Annotated features of domestic cat – Felis catus genome,” was published in GigaScience 2014, 3:13 (August 5, 2014) (see “Domestic Cat Genome Sequenced”). The study reported sequencing of a female Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon, a mixed-breed cat from Russian named Boris, and Sylvester, a wildcat ancestor of domestic cats. The report showed that domestic cats have retained “a highly conserved ancestral mammal genome organization” in comparison with ancestral cats (see Driscoll et al., 2007, “The near eastern origin of cat domestication,” Science 317: 519–23). Both species, F. catus and Felix silvestris, have 38 chromosomes, 18 pairs of autosomes, and two pairs of dimorphic gender-determining chromosomes. Details of the domestic cat genome structure included the presence of 217 loci of endogenous retrovirus-like elements (amounting to 55.7% of the entire genome, comprised of long interspersed elements (LINEs), short interspersed elements (SINEs), satellite DNA, retroviral long terminal repeats (LTRs) and “others”); 21,865 protein coding genes (open reading frames or ORFs), detected by comparison with eight mammalian genomes (from human, chimpanzee, macaque, dog, cow, horse, rat, and mouse); and a wealth of genetic variability in single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), insertion/deletion events (indels); novel families of complex tandem repeat elements; and short terminal repeat (STR) loci.
The richest Americans avoid paying $600 billion a year in taxes, in part through lack of income reporting to the IRS that Biden is trying to change.
CJEU says rights owners are not obliged to make available each part of a product separately in order to benefit from unregistered design rights
The Hong Kong High Court has issued an order granting a landmark preliminary injunction in favour of US-based nutrition supplement brand ChildLife and restraining passing off in mainland China via e-commerce platforms.
It is the first-ever preliminary injunction issued in Hong Kong SAR concerning passing-off activity in China. The court, in a ruling last Wednesday, October 20, took into consideration torts committed by the defendants outside of Hong Kong SAR and restrained them from passing off in mainland China.
The decision holds major significance as it lays the ground for parties to use Hong Kong SAR as a venue for pursuing infringement and passing off actions against suspected violations taking place in mainland China.
Trade secrets and disclosure would seem to be clearly demarcated opposites, but the reality is that the relationship between them is often more nuanced. In this case, the nuance is expressed in the context of the balance between the ‘right of information’ of the participants to a public tender and the possible presence of ‘trade secrets’ in the bidding documentation. A claim of trade secret protection is one of the objections to disclosure that may be raised by the bidder against a competitor who seeks to examine the tender documentation in order to evaluate his further legal steps.
[...]
It is clear that: (a) the ‘trade secrets defence’ has in recent times (especially since the implementation of the Trade Secrets Directive in 2018) been used frequently, often as strategic measure in administrative proceedings in Italy; (b) the contracting authorities show a tendency to deny access when such a defence is raised and, therefore, force the party that requested access to ask the court to allow disclosure; and (c) the administrative courts, when addressing a request to lift the secrecy defence, tend not to enter into a detailed analysis of the facts of the cases, limiting themselves to high-level discussion and analysis, remanding the case back to the contracting authority and requesting further examination.
As such, an annoying back-and-forth between contracting authorities and courts takes place. In the context of public tenders, there is in fact no specific procedure/regulation/set of rules aimed at simplifying the evaluation of the presence of trade secrets and thereby avoid lengthy legal proceedings to assess the presence of proper secrets.
Also, it must be taken into consideration that once access is allowed, the party requesting access may then try to have the tender annulled on the basis of the disclosed documentation. This, due to the length of the administrative proceedings on the request for access, can carry on for months after the tender has been awarded, casting uncertainty on the tender awarding process.
As many brands know all too well, the best laid strategy to manage the channels through which their goods are sold can be quickly disrupted by unauthorized sellers. Because online marketplaces like Amazon are essentially open platforms, virtually anyone able to source a brand’s products can sell there – regardless of a brand’s specific channel management strategy. Often, these sellers do not adhere to brand quality standards; they do not contribute to marketing and conversion efforts; and they do not adhere to manufacturers’ minimum advertised price policies.
While many brands are plagued by unauthorized sellers, there is still a massive amount of confusion regarding what tactics are most effective in shutting down such unauthorized sales. For example, there are seemingly countless brand protection and monitoring software companies that tout their ability to remove a percentage of unauthorized sellers using automated cease-and-desist letters. Some companies claim to have highly effective marketplace takedown tricks, while others claim to “know” secret marketplace tactics that others do not. The reality is ultimately not quite so rosy, and in fact, none of these tactics are especially effective because: (1) the law generally protects product resellers, and (2) these tactics – even if successful against some number of small, unsophisticated sellers – do not drive meaningful commercial outcomes, which is what brands need.
Online trade channels have become a substantial aspect of many brand owners’ business. As part II of its ongoing series relating to online sale controls and enforcement strategies, The Fashion Law discussed the importance for brand owners to lay down the necessary legal foundation for tackling (anticipated) defences raised by unauthorised sellers (e.g. the first sale doctrine) and then engaging in a data-driven, precision enforcement process tailored to drive real commercial metrics.
t is a legal maxim that patents, like any other intellectual property rights, are territorial rights. Patents are granted on a national basis and so patent holders seeking protection in multiple countries are invited to procure multiple national rights. Historically, courts, and most notably in the United States, have opted for a narrow understanding of the concept of territoriality of patents. This has more recently been reaffirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Deepsouth Packing Co. v. Laitram Corp, 406 U.S. 518 (1972) and Microsoft Corp. v. AT&T Corp, 550 U.S. 437 (2007) where the Court refused to extend the U.S. Patent Act extraterritorially based on the presumption that federal statutes, including patent statutes, shall not extend to acts occurring abroad.
The traditional notion that patents are territorial rights is, however, under considerable stress. Just as commerce is becoming increasingly global, so do infringing activities coincide less neatly with national borders. Depending on the technical field, the subject-matter is also becoming increasingly prone to disseminate across borders. Because patent statutes differ between different jurisdictions, there is and will continue to be a tension between these economic and technological developments and the territorial limitation of patent rights.
What are we talking about? Let us take a simple hypothetical example. Assume that a patent covers a system for a machine learning model, which involves the use of computing devices configured to receive sourced data, process data, configure an algorithm and to complete a particular machine learning model. For each claimed configuration there is a set of routine operations to be completed, including receiving requests to perform the computational services and validating such requests. Further assume that a third party uses the same machine learning technique to create a mobile application that sources substantial amounts of user data and then reads and transforms that data into usable content in the application. If each operation is performed on servers in different countries, and if users whose data is sourced and users who use the mobile application reside in different countries, some where there is a patent and some where there is none, where does a prospective infringement take place? A number of possibilities could be thought of, ranging from where data is collected and where servers are located to where users are residing. Each point of contact could in theory be sufficient to render liability, but that seems to ignore that a full and complete infringement is not performed anywhere. The inclination to catch all infringing acts in one go clearly struggles with the fact that patent protection remains territorial.
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Can we find any unifying legal principles that can be extended across jurisdictions? At the end of the day, whether a particular conduct falls under a particular patent claim or not is a technical test. This fundamental criteria for assessing patent infringement should not be abandoned merely because the conduct is now cross-border. Just as we examine when there is infringement from a technical standpoint, so should we evaluate where an infringement occurs from that same lens. This is possible to do without dissecting claim elements, by instead focusing on where the technical contribution of the invention as a whole is achieved. This analysis is however still largely one-sided from a contacts point of view, as it is limited to contacts linked to the relevant country of protection, which is typically the forum. After defining the contacts to the relevant country of protection, it should also be deemed necessary to weigh those contacts established in other countries. Perhaps, and with some effort when adopting a more uniform and balanced legal test, the patent loophole may indeed be closed across borders.
Don’t worry, the “where’s the problem, we have a solution” squad over at Ford has been busy, apparently, with figuring out a way to make your truck’s exhaust tips disappear.Well, at least retract back into the safety of the rear of the truck when you’re going off-roading, for example, in order to allow for better departure angles.
A judge has refused generic-drug maker Mylan’s request to stay Neurim’s patent infringement litigation to wait for a European Patent Office ruling on the validity of the Israeli pharmaceutical company’s melatonin patent, saying on Friday that the patent would have expired by then.
Deputy High Court Judge Ian Karet said that, although the patent office could deliver a final view on the patent for the drug Circadin in a relatively short time, Neurim Pharmaceuticals (1991) Ltd. will still have lost its opportunity to obtain an injunction to block Mylan’s melatonin product from the market.
Canada’s innovation challenges are well-documented. Among the G7, we are the only country to have experienced a decline in R&D spending as a fraction of GDP over the last 20 years. Only Italy produces fewer so-called triadic patents, innovations that are patented in each of the main three patent offices of the European Union, Japan, and the United States. And while 50 years ago we had the second highest labour productivity among the G7, we now have the second lowest, ahead only of Japan.
The European Patent Office (EPO) has a notoriously strict approach to assessing added matter according to Article 123(2) EPC. In the recent decision T 2842/18, the EPO’s Technical Board of Appeal 3.3.04 scrutinized the basis for a therapeutic effect in a second medical use claim. The decision demonstrates that speculative language can undermine a verbatim statement of a therapeutic effect in the application as filed.
According to Article 123(2) EPC, a European patent application or European patent may not be amended in such a way that it contains subject matter which extends beyond the content of the application as filed. Established case law sets out the ‘gold standard’ for assessing added subject matter according to Article 123(2) EPC: the claimed subject matter must be directly and unambiguously derivable from the application as filed. After the amendment, the skilled person may not be presented with new technical information.
In T 2842/18, the claim in question had been amended to include the medical use “for preventing or slowing down the progression in structural joint damage and erosion caused by rheumatoid arthritis”. The question was whether this effect could be directly and unambiguously derived from the application as filed.
The Opposition Division had previously held that the requirements of Article 123(2) EPC were met because the therapeutic effect was disclosed verbatim in Example 3 of the application as filed: “It is expected that re-treatment under the protocol herein […] will be effective in preventing or slowing down the progression in structural joint damage and erosion caused by RA”.
How a win in the Supreme Court challenged a linchpin of the genetic-testing industry.
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Not so long ago, if you asked someone about the US Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of granting patents on human genes, you’d probably get one of two responses. Biotechnology insiders would shrug — such patents had been standard practice for decades. They were considered a linchpin of the burgeoning genetic-testing industry. Those less intimate with the inner workings of biotech often had a different reaction: “But that’s just … wrong,” said lawyer Chris Hansen. “Who can we sue?”
In 2009, Hansen, a veteran of civil-rights cases at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in New York City, embarked on a lawsuit that ended gene patenting in the United States. The effort seemed doomed, yet Hansen went on to win at the US Supreme Court, challenging the very idea of what patents are and what they should do.
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But Contreras succeeds in his main mission: to detail the narrative history of a landmark patent case. The personal stories of key players are rich with detail. We learn about Tania Simoncelli, who, as an ACLU intern with a passion for science and social-justice issues, first brought gene patents to the attention of Hansen. And we encounter Herman Yue, who, at the time that the case was launched, was an intern for a federal district judge, and who just happened to have a doctorate in molecular biology. Yue was pivotal in crafting a surprise early court decision in favour of the ACLU.
Readers are also treated to the inside story of the schism in the US government, with some agencies, most notably the patent office, in favour of gene patents, and the National Institutes of Health, among others, against them. It fell to acting solicitor general Neal Katyal to walk a tightrope between arguing parties, eventually developing a federal government stance: namely, whole-gene sequences as they are found in genomes should not be patentable, but the assembled protein-coding regions of a gene — minus intervening bits of non-coding DNA often scattered throughout — should. The compromise satisfied no one completely.
By 2013, when the Supreme Court issued its unanimous decision in favour of the ACLU, gene patents and Myriad-style testing of single genes were already falling out of fashion. Medical diagnostics had moved on to multi-gene testing, and now, increasingly, the emphasis is on whole-genome sequencing. But this story stands as a guide to the forces that shape an increasingly important industry — and to the vexed influence of patents.
Haseltine Lake Kempner prides itself on its specialists. We have formed a new Materials Science team, bringing together attorneys from across the firm, all of whom have a wealth of knowledge and experience in materials science – many having doctorates and/or years of professional experience in the area. With the discipline being of increasing importance to many of our clients, we wanted to introduce you to the team, which is led by partner Alex Rogers and senior associate Michael Ford.
“A high proportion of cancer patients are deprived of the benefits of chemotherapies because of toxic side-effects. Other patients either are too ill or too elderly or just unwilling to even start chemotherapy. That is the gap that we see Veyonda® filling by allowing the patient to still gain the benefit of the chemotherapy but at dosages that are much better tolerated,” says CEO.
Phone and tablet mount maker GPS Lockbox was unable to convince an administrative tribunal to review patents that National Products Inc. has sued over.
GPS Lockbox asked the Patent Trial and Appeal Board to review three NPI patents covering a docking sleeve. The requests came after NPI filed an infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
The PTAB denied all three requests, with the last decision Thursday. There, GPS Lockbox argued various claims in U.S. Patent No. 10,630,334 were invalid because they were anticipated or would have been obvious.
Ten years after the Agreement on the Application of Article 65 of the Convention on the Grant of European Patents (the London Agreement) entered into force in Hungary, the long-awaited clarification about the enforcement of European patents was provided by the courts. According to the courts, the national scope of protection of a European patent is established by the filing of a full Hungarian translation of the patent description. Where the patentee does not file a full Hungarian translation along with the validation of the European patent, and if the translation is not made available to potential infringers through either publication by the Hungarian Intellectual Property Office (HIPO) or by directly serving it before initiating a legal dispute, a preliminary injunction may not be claimed. The recent Metropolitan Court of Appeals decision (8 July 2021, 8.Pkf.25.564/2021/3) confirmed the first-instance Metropolitan Court decision (3.Pk.20.925/2021/9), in which its precedent-setting previous decision (3.Pk.24.079/2018/10) was cited and confirmed. Based on these decisions, patentees should be aware of potential pitfalls regarding the enforcement of European patents and must take every possible step before they can start a preliminary injunction procedure.
The Unified Patent Court’s Protocol on Privileges and Immunities comes into force
On 27 October 2021, the first of the three treaties underpinning the new Unified Patent Court (UPC) and unitary patent (UP) system comes into force. It is the ‘Protocol on Privileges and Immunities of the Unified Patent Court’ (PPI). Every Member State hosting premises of the court (i.e. the Court of Appeal, CFI Central Division, CFI Regional division and CFI Local division) must accede to the PPI, which underpins the legal status of the court within hosting Member States.
The PPI comes into force on 27 October because it is 30 days following Germany’s 27 September 2021 deposit of its instrument of ratification of the PPI with the General Secretariat of the Council of Europe – Germany’s deposit completed the minimum ratification threshold for the PPI.
Koh’s nomination advances; US’s $100m patent infringement blow; IBA considers compulsory licences; Cleveland Indians in name dispute; High Court targets ISPs; JPO launches manga guidelines; EUIPO issues e-commerce counterfeit warning
Alphabet Inc.‘s Google will avoid patent infringement litigation in Waco, Texas, after the Federal Circuit ordered Judge Alan D. Albright to surrender another case.
The case involves allegations by Jenam Tech LLC that Google’s use of an internet transport protocol infringed eight patents. Albright denied Google’s motion to transfer the case from U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California where its headquarters is located.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said the suit’s “center of gravity” is clearly in Northern California, and not in West Texas. “There is …
In 2015, the IEEE made changes to its Patent Policy for standard-essential patents (SEPs). Among other things, that policy strongly disfavored seeking injunctive relief for SEPs because injunctive relief permits using the threat of enjoining an entire product to extract a royalty that covers more than the value contributed by the patent. The policy also set forth three non-limiting factors to be used in determining a reasonable royalty rate—the value contributed by the SEP to the smallest salable compliant implementation (analogous to the smallest saleable patent practicing unit in US law), the value contributed by the SEP to that implementation in light of all other SEPs that also contribute value to that implementation, and comparable licenses. These factors are not mandatory, only encouraged.
IEEE received criticism of this approach, primarily from patent licensing companies who were obtaining high license fees and were concerned that the changes would reduce their profit margin. In contrast, the majority of standards participants were happy with these changes—after the policy change, contributions to IEEE standards reversed a declining trend and began to increase once again.
But, given the vocal criticism from licensors, the IEEE decided to request feedback on whether to reverse course and change the 2015 Patent Policy.
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Now that the comments have been submitted, it’s time for IEEE to review them and determine what path forward the organization should take. But based on the content of these comments, and the relative balance, the IEEE should feel very comfortable that much of industry supports their existing patent policy and sees no reason to go back to in terrorem injunctions and completely amorphous valuation procedures.
Mathys & Squire has featured in an exclusive article published by The Telegraph, covering the introduction of so-called ‘security bonds’ of at least £50,000 for UK businesses seeking to litigate in the EU post-Brexit.
Partner Andreas Wietzke, from the Mathys & Squire Munich office, commented: “For British businesses, defending your intellectual property (IP) in the EU has become a much more costly affair since Brexit. This could have a chilling effect on actions by UK litigants in Europe, particularly for startups and SMEs with limited funding.
“For those in the UK with valuable patents or trade marks that are being infringed by businesses in Europe, the decision whether to pursue litigation is not quite so simple as it was before Brexit. Having to put up £50,000 or £100,000 to have your case heard in Germany, France or the Netherlands will give some of them pause for thought.”
In April 2020, the South African patent office granted a patent to an artificial intelligence (AI) program called DABUS, an acronym for ‘Device for the Autonomous Bootstrapping of Unified Sentience’, for the novel way in which it used fractal geometry to come up with a better design for food containers that both improves grip as well as heat transfer. Professor Adrian Hilton, director of the Institute for People-Centred AI at the University of Surrey, hailed this decision as an indication of the shift from “an age in which invention was the preserve of people to an era where machines are capable of realising the inventive step, unleashing the potential of AI-generated inventions for the benefit of society.”
It’s been thrilling and even entertaining to watch constitutionality challenges to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board go through the courts – but enough is enough
In-house counsel at Sanofi and two tech companies reveal how they manage these proceedings and what private practice lawyers can do to help
The EPO uses the “problem/solution” approach to assess inventive step. This approach involves determining the technical effect that the invention contributes over the closest prior art. It has become common practice before the EPO to look at whether the technical effect of an invention is “plausible” from a patent application or patent and therefore if it is permissible to file post-published data to confirm the technical effect. This is often critical to whether or not subject matter is considered to be inventive.
However, divergent approaches have developed regarding the circumstances in which post-published data can be taken into account. Firstly, there has been divergence in how the “plausible” standard is applied. Some Boards have decided that post-published should be considered provided the technical effect is not “implausible”, a lower bar than requiring the technical effect to be “plausible”. Secondly, there has been divergence away from the “plausible/implausible” concept entirely, with some Boards holding that this approach is incompatible with the EPO’s requirement that the “problem/solution” approach is used to analyse inventive step. The rationale here is that an applicant cannot be expected to necessarily know what the closest prior art is when the application is filed.
In this week’s Saturday Opinion, Grant Shoebridge of Pearce IP argues that the Australian Federal Court’s recent DABUS decision is a progressive one that recognises the potential for AI-driven life sciences innovation
In our community it’s certain that there will be many people with very strong views about patents. It’s fair to say that the patents system is at times not fit for purpose, with such phenomena as patent trolls, submarine patents, and patent war chests doing nothing but leading it into disrepute. So it’s interesting to read the words of 3D printer hotend manufacturer E3D, as they talk about why they feel the need to patent some of their inventions, and how they intend to proceed with them.
The result is a no-nonsense explanation of why their work being reproduced by overseas competitors has brought them to this point, and in short: they’re patenting very specific inventions rather than broad catch-alls, they are making what they call a legally binding promise not to enforce the patents against non-commercial or academic experimenters, and they will continue to open-source as much as they can.
Novartis said Crystal Pharmaceutical’s proposed generic version of Entresto infringes two patents related to the blockbuster treatment for heart failure, expanding the companies’ legal fight.
The innovation patent has been Australia’s second tier patent right since 2001, but it is now being phased out. Just over two months have now passed since the final day on which new, original (i.e. not derived from an existing application) innovation patents could be filed. As of 26 August 2021, the only way to obtain an innovation patent application is by division or conversion from an application that itself has a filing date on or before 25 August 2021. Innovation patents have a maximum term of eight years from the initial filing date, and thus after 25 August 2029, at the latest, there will be no more innovation patents. Predictably, the number of innovation patent applications being filed grew significantly during the weeks and months leading up to the final deadline, driven in large part by applications of dubious merit originating in China and India.
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In the final days, Australian resident applicants filed innovation patent applications in unprecedented numbers, apparently driven primarily by those who had received advice from patent attorneys about the final deadline and the implications of the phase out of the innovation patent. Indian and Chinese applicants continued to fleece the system for cheap patent certificates, accounting for over half of the applications filed in August. Filings originating elsewhere in the world increased only modestly, suggesting that genuine demand for innovation patents by foreign applicants remained relatively low until the end.
The rate at which the Patent Trial and Appeal Board uses its discretion to deny patent reviews under the precedential Fintiv decision declined over the last six months, a drop that attorneys largely attribute to the board giving less weight to the trial date in parallel infringement litigation and petitioners growing more comfortable with stipulations.
The PTAB’s Fintiv decision, which was issued in March 2020 and became precedential in May of that year, laid out six factors the board must consider when deciding whether to use its discretion not to review patents involved in district court suits. These include weighing the…
Sources believe that licensing of IP and personality rights may be beneficial, but judicial and legislative solutions are needed in the longer run
Patrick Coyne, partner at Finnegan, becomes AIPLA’s new president at the organisation’s annual meeting in National Harbor this week
Although CoviDTH diagnostic results are intended to be visually interpreted, additional patent claims include data capture and analysis via optical, infrared, and ultrasonic images processing methods.
In Japanese patent litigation, calling expert witnesses is very rare and the parties usually try to prove common technical knowledge (CGK) by submitting documentary evidence, such as publications available as of the priority date and written expert declarations. Thus, parties need to be aware that descriptions in the publications are crucial and cannot be supplemented by experts’ live testimony.
The importance of proving CGK was highlighted in a recent IP High Court case (Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp. v. Wyeth LLC, IP High Court Case No. 2020 (Gyo-Ke) 10015; Decision date: May 17, 2021) filed by Merck Sharp & Dohme (“MSD”) as an appeal from a JPO trial decision holding Wyeth’s patent valid. Wyeth’s patent covers Prevenar 13® containing 13 serotypes of pneumoniae, the most widely used pneumococcal conjugate vaccine in the world, sold by its parent company Pfizer. MSD asserted that the functional feature of the claimed invention substantially existed in Wyeth’s product Prevenar 7 containing seven serotypes of pneumoniae (“Prevenar 7”), which was commercially available as of the priority date or, based on CGK, it could have been easily conceived by a person skilled in the art as of the priority date of the patent. However, the court affirmed the JPO’s decision upholding validity of the patent on grounds that the claims had inventive step over Prevenar 7 and rejected MSD’s assertions.
Molnupiravir is the first COVID-19 product to be licensed to the Medicines Patent Pool since the start of the pandemic
The rapid integration of AI-based technology into many aspects of our lives brings with it a range of interesting legal and regulatory challenges. In the world of intellectual property, it is recognised that the use of AI techniques, in particular to analyse large data sets, is capable of providing new and valuable insights that can form the foundation of patentable inventions.
The biggest story in patent law over the past three years has been the emergence of the Waco Division of the Western District of Texas as the undisputed capital of U.S. patent litigation. The lone district judge sitting in Waco, Judge Alan Albright, has engaged in an extensive campaign to entice patentees to file suit in his courtroom. And those efforts have succeeded. In 2016 and 2017, the two years before Judge Albright took the bench in 2018, the Waco Division received a total of five patent cases. In 2019, 217 patent suits were filed in Waco. In 2020, that number increased to 761—more than the number of patent cases filed in any other district court in the country and over 20% of patent cases filed nationwide. Judge Albright is on track to receive well over 700 cases again in 2021.
Most patent suits in Waco are filed by NPEs and involve computers and communication technology. Judge Albright’s courtroom is particularly attractive to NPEs because he moves cases quickly through litigation and his procedural rulings tend to favor patentees—both of which increase patentees’ leverage during settlement negotiations. Quicker settlements for larger amounts allow NPEs to more rapidly move on to their next target.
Even though the United Kingdom is expressly mentioned in the Protocol for Provisional Application (PPA) of the Unified Patent Court Agreement as one of the states that has to give its support to the PPA, this is not seen as a stumbling block for the entry into force of the Protocol by the member states of the Unitary Patent project.
A judge ruled Friday that a BASF subsidiary is entitled to “nominal damages” only as a result of Carpmaels & Ransford LLP missing a deadline to appeal an invalidated vehicle emissions treatment patent, saying he wasn’t persuaded the patent would have boosted the chemical company’s profits.
High Court Judge Adam Johnson noted in his ruling that Carpmaels & Ransford, a European intellectual property-focused law firm, had admitted fault in the professional negligence matter, so the case before him was largely what losses might flow to any of four BASF units from the law firm’s breach.
Shakespearean analogies fail to convince High Court that BASF’s €1bn claim has merit as company awarded only ‘nominal’ damages in Carpmaels patent row
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Although BASF argued these were its calculated losses, it invited the court to conclude the precise losses suffered.
The dispute centred on European patent 1,663,458 (‘458 patent) which, according to the claim, occupied “vital space” in relation to complying with diesel emission standards.
BASF contended that Carpmaels, which admitted negligence on its part, failed to file an appeal in time after the EPO revoked the ‘458 patent in 2012.
BASF said that had the appeal succeeded, the revocation would never have taken effect and the company would have had a valid patent until July 2024.
Changes proposed by CNIPA will give Chinese clients access to a wider range of overseas IP advisors – if foreign firms take up the offer
This week, over a thousand attendees are expected at the annual meeting of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AILPA). Several Vorys attorneys are participating as leaders and attendees.
Today in a pre-meeting briefing, senior U.S. Patent and Trademark (USPTO) officials gave updates on key areas of ongoing activity by the Office. This activity essentially relates to improving inclusion in the patent system and harnessing artificial intelligence (AI) and automation in patent examination.
The UKIPO has partnered with the Alan Turing Institute and the University of Exeter to bring two roundtables on the topic about Artificial Intelligence and Intellectual Property – AI and IP: An AI Ecosystem Perspective and AI and IP in the Creative Industries. The events will be held online on 9 November (11:00am-12:00pm, CET) and 11 November 2021 (10:00am-11:30am, CET). Further information about the roundtables can be found here for the event on the 9th, and here for the event on the 11th.
Over the past few years, and after decades as little more than a mathematical curiosity, useful industrial applications of AI have become commonplace. AI is now recognised as one of the primary drivers of computing development. In 2018, Canadians Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton and Yann LeCun – the ‘godfathers of AI’ – received the Turing Award, computing’s highest honour, for their foundational work on deep learning. The International Data Corporation forecasts that worldwide revenues for the AI market will grow to nearly $330 billion in 2021, and will exceed $550 billion by 2024 (IDC Semiannual AI Tracker, January 2021).
Uncertainty surrounding patent eligibility jurisprudence has been a thorn in the side of many patent applicants, patent holders, scholars, and judges for years, leading voices in the patent sector to issue repeated, though unavailing, calls for legislative action. Recent activity by lawmakers, however, suggests that rising innovation in the artificial intelligence (AI) sector may be viewed as a catalyst for change.
Central to the issue of patent eligibility is the framework set forth in Mayo Collaborative Services v. Prometheus Labs, 132 S.Ct. 1289 (2012) and Alice v. CLS Bank International, 134 S. Ct. 2347 (2014). The Patent Act permits patents for “any new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof …” But “laws of nature, natural phenomena and abstract ideas are not patentable.”
Checkerboard prints are everywhere – again, Wall Street Journal fashion editor Jacob Gallagher wrote recently, noting that “whether they remind you of surrealism, ’70s ska bands or [Fast Times at Ridgemont High character] Jeff Spicoli’s Vans, graphic grid prints are back,” with luxury titan Louis Vuitton and budding young brands, alike, “pushing the pattern” in a nod to the enduring appeal of the eye-catching print. Look beyond the onslaught of checkered wares – from Vans sneakers and Clare V. bucket hats to J.W. Anderson vests and Louis Vuitton bags – that have found a home on the runway and on brands’ e-commerce sites, and you will see that these prints are currently at the center of a number of noteworthy legal battles, in which brands are claiming rights in certain versions of the ubiquitous pattern for use in connection with certain goods/services.
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Against that background, Nike asserted that Vans’ attempt to “broadly register checkerboard designs in connection with apparel” by way of a number of applications for registration that it has filed with the USPTO beginning in November 2018 demonstrates the skatewear brand’s “intent to impede the ability of others to use checkerboard designs in connection with apparel.”
As of this week, that opposition is still underway, and in fact, counsel for Nike is looking to have it consolidated with additional proceedings that it has initiated since. It turns out that the Beaverton, Oregon-based sportswear titan did not stop after filing the December 2019 opposition against Vans; it filed an additional opposition to block the registration of a separate Vans checkerboard mark for use on apparel and socks that spring. And in April 2020 and March 2021, respectively, after the USPTO agreed to register two of Vans’ checkerboard marks, Nike initiated cancellation proceedings, asking the TTAB to revoke the registrations.
At the heart of these separate (but largely similar) proceedings is Nike’s argument that “each variation of [Vans’] checkerboard pattern is: (1) ornamental and fails to function as mark, and/or (2) is nondistinctive and incapable of acquiring distinctiveness,” and thus, should not be registered as marks.
Readers of this Blog are all likely to be very skilled IP experts, whether as practitioners, legal specialists or Judges. Hence, they are certainly well aware of the so-called “enhanced protection” enjoyed by well-known trade marks against junior signs.
As we know, in fact, in Europe when assessing both (i) the distinctiveness requirement of a trade mark in the face of an earlier registered well-known trade mark and (ii) the possible infringement of a well-known trade mark by a junior sign, the evaluation should not necessarily be limited to an assessment of likelihood of confusion between signs. When evaluating distinctiveness and infringement the interpreter will take into account also (a) the possible prejudice for the well-known trade mark deriving from the registration/use of the junior sign and (b) the possible unfair advantage that the applicant/owner/user of the posterior sign might enjoy because of the existence of and link with the earlier well-known trade mark.
The Italian rules applicable to this aspect are aligned to those of the rest of Europe, since Article 12 (dealing with distinctiveness) and 21 (dealing with infringement) of the Italian Industrial Property Code were and are derived from EU Directives (originally CE 89/104, now 2015/2436 Articles 5 and 10 respectively). As such, they provide that a trade mark that has a reputation protects its owner against a junior mark when a use of the latter without due cause may imply blurring, tarnishment, or ‘free-riding’ of the repute of the earlier well-known trade mark, as per (a) or (b) above.
To follow on the topic of good relationships going bad and IP disputes arising as a result, an interesting case is taking place between two companies for the ownership over the German trade marks “GL” and “GR” for vehicle radio remote controls.
The UK government has run a consultation on the future of the UK’s exhaustion of IP rights regime. This ran for 12 weeks, closing on 31 August 2021.
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The principle of exhaustion is a limitation to intellectual property rights which is mainly relevant in the context of imported goods. Generally, once a particular item has been placed on the market with the IP rights holder’s consent that IP rights holder’s rights are exhausted, meaning they cannot prevent further dealings of that particular item. For example, the copyright subsisting in a specific single item (a book, say) would be exhausted once that specific copy of the book is sold in the UK by the rights holder.
The U.S. Copyright Office is beginning a study of copyright protections for news publishers, including a look at requiring online platforms to pay publishers for aggregated content.
The study comes after several U.S. senators in May requested the office consider the viability of adding more protections to U.S. copyright law for news publishers. Additional safeguards for publishers might be necessary to maintain the news industry, the agency said in a notice scheduled to be published in the Federal Register Oct. 12.
News aggregation sites are generally online platforms that collect links and portions of articles for their readers, and sometimes …
I even used Blender to render a heavy 3D scene that would have brought a lesser laptop to its knees, and it still managed to hold its ground—albeit some sluggishness. Granted, you probably shouldn’t buy this Chromebook for serious 3D work, but the fact I’m able to render a scene with it truly shows how far we’ve come with Chrome OS. You won’t find your usual Adobe apps here—although the company recently launched Photoshop and Illustrator for the web—and it’s a bit of a hassle to install Linux apps without a dedicated app store. Google, it’s about time you made an official app store for Linux.
I spent several hours in the last few days creating an sddm theme that includes nine different background images based on nine different terminal colorschemes. I also packaged my sddm theme for the Arch User Repository (AUR) and for the DTOS core repository.
After memory folios failed to make it into Linux 5.15, this low-level change to the kernel memory management code that has possible performance implications is looking to land for Linux 5.16.
Ahead of the Linux 5.16 merge window that may open as soon as tomorrow, Matthew Wilcox sent in his pull request for introducing folios to the kernel. Here is the main excerpt from the pull request for those not familiar with folios or having forgot the details over the months that this feature has been in the works…
Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe has prepared his various pull requests ahead of the upcoming Linux 5.16 merge window.
Axboe calls it “a big one” for the changes he oversees going into Linux 5.16.
Even though the cost of storage per GB continues to fall, it’s common for users to need to find and remove duplicates files. Duplicates can stem from any file stored on your computer, be it images, software, music, video or what not. The process of finding and removing duplicates is time-consuming. Considering the volume of duplicate files, this is easier said than done. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that are designed to remove the laborious nature of finding duplicates by scanning and detecting your system for duplicate files in every format.
Duplicate files are a real annoyance. Aside from using disk space, these files do nothing but clutter up your drive, make your PC run slower, and increase the difficulty level significantly when it comes to finding the right version of a specific file: is it the one I just updated, or the other one?
Using a dictionary application is not backdated yet if you’re a vocab learner or you’re learning a new language. Previously most people used dictionary applications for spelling checking and learning the word meaning. In modern dictionary applications, you do the maximum utilization by using the dictionary app for spell checking, word meaning, synonyms and antonyms, the origin of a word, pronunciation, and different use cases of a word. If you’re a professional writer, a good dictionary application will definitely help you in writing. These dictionary types of quick and handy tools are commonly available and popular for Windows, but we can find dictionary apps for Linux as well that will give a professional vibe.
SMPlayer intends to be a complete front-end for MPlayer, from basic features like playing videos, DVDs, and VCDs to more advanced features like support for MPlayer filters and more. One of the most interesting features of SMPlayer: it remembers the settings of all files you play. So you start to watch a movie but you have to leave… don’t worry, when you open that movie again it will resume at the same point you left it, and with the same settings: audio track, subtitles, volume…
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Caddy on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Caddy is a powerful, enterprise-ready, open-source web server with automatic HTTPS written in Go. It is designed with security in mind and provides a number of features that are useful for hosting websites. Caddy is compatible with Operating Systems such as Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac, Solaris, and Android platforms.
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 Caddy Web Server on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
In this tutorial guide we are going to learn how to install Grafana 8 on Ubuntu 21.04 server. Grafana is a complete observability stack that allows you to monitor and analyze logs, metrics and traces.
Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand your data insight. Grafana can create, explore and create beautiful dashboards that can be shared with your teams.
Lists all installed kernels minus the current one. This is useful to uninstall older kernels that take too much space on /boot partition.
Firefox is a web browser from the Mozilla project, which is a part of the non-profit organization Mozilla Foundation. It can be downloaded free of charge to install on any popular operating system including Linux. If you have installed minimal Debian 11 bullseye with GUI and want to install Firefox browser later then here are the commands.
Being an open-source project, this browser is constantly getting new updates from its lively community. There are numerous extensions available which we can use to increase the standard range of functions as required, contributing to the great popularity and spread of Mozilla Firefox.
Each version of Firefox goes through several stages of development. As an interested user, you can extensively test new features in the Nightly, Aurora, and Beta versions before the official release. Known security holes are fixed within a few hours, so you can surf the web safely.
Well, Firefox is available in two editions one is Firefox -ESR, and the other is Firefox Standard.
If you have an up and running NextCloud server, then to easily access & sync your cloud-stored data we can use its client application available for Linux, Windows, and macOS desktops including for smartphones. Here we learn the steps to install and set up NextCloud Client on Debian 11 Bullseye or 10 Buster using the command terminal.
Nextcloud desktop client has offered the option of automatically syncing only individual directories. The users can specify which directories should be locally synchronized with the server. And if you want can download any file directly from the folder set by the client. In this way, they can prevent their local had disk from getting running out of space. Tutorial for those who want to install their NextCloud Server on Debian 11 or 10.
This tutorial explains how to setup Zorin OS 16 to a computer for end-users. This includes methods to install either to internal hard disk or external drive storage, even a USB Flash Drive, dualboot or singleboot, and with either UEFI-GPT or BIOS-MBR options. Please make backup if you are dualbooting and be extra careful following every single step. Let’s start!
SED : stands for stream editor used for Filtering and Transforming on input stream from Files or pipelines…
GIMP is free, open-source raster graphics editing software primarily used for image manipulation and image editing, transcoding between various image formats, free-form drawing, and many more specialized tasks. GIMP is released under GPL-3.0-or-later license and is available for Linux, macOS, and Microsoft Windows.
In the following tutorial, you will learn to install the GIMP application on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa using three alternative methods that you can choose from.
Cockpit is a free remote server manager that is lightweight and easy to use for GNU/Linux servers. Cockpit is a web-based graphical interface for servers intended for people new to Linux to the experts such as sysadmins. Cockpit makes Linux discoverable, allowing anyone using the software to perform tasks such as start containers, administer storage, configure networks, and inspect logs.
In the following tutorial, you will learn how to install Cockpit on your Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa system.
Firefox is a web browser from the Mozilla project, which is a part of the non-profit organization Mozilla Foundation. It can be downloaded free of charge to install on any popular operating system including Linux. If you have installed minimal Debian 11 bullseye with GUI and want to install Firefox browser later then here are the commands.
MySQL is an open-source relational database management system. Its one of the popular relational management system.
Mysql is commonly installed as part of the popular LAMP or LEMP (Linux, Apache/Nginx, MySQL/MariaDB, PHP/Python/Perl) stack. It implements the relational model and Structured Query Language (SQL) to manage and query data.
In this guide we are going to install mysql 8 on Fedora 34/35
Here’s a tale as old as epoch time. Since there has been C and Unix, and (later on) Linux, we’ve had zombies. Specifically, there are processes that get marked as a zombie process. Misunderstood by some, ignored by others, and immune to the efforts of so many of us trying to kill these processes without much success. Why is that?
If you have an up and running NextCloud server, then to easily access & sync your cloud-stored data we can use its client application available for Linux, Windows, and macOS desktops including for smartphones. Here we learn the steps to install and set up NextCloud Client on Debian 11 Bullseye or 10 Buster using the command terminal.
Nextcloud desktop client has offered the option of automatically syncing only individual directories. The users can specify which directories should be locally synchronized with the server. And if you want can download any file directly from the folder set by the client. In this way, they can prevent their local had disk from getting running out of space. Tutorial for those who want to install their NextCloud Server on Debian 11 or 10.
SeedSigner is the new, cool kid on the block when it comes to DIY Bitcoin hardware wallets. It’s a very interesting device that certainly does things differently compared to the other hardware wallets on the market.
Nearing the end of 2021, most blockchain dApps still have large parts of their stack that are centralized.
The smart contracts that power most DeFi protocols tend to be the only really decentralized aspect.
Most applications still have servers running on services like AWS that power their frontend user interfaces or process backend data and stats.
One of the main tenants of cryptocurrency and blockchain is “censorship resistance”.
Platforms like Quickswap and Hot Potato are great, but what happens if Amazon decides to turn off the servers powering the actual app that users are using?
Secure configurations are a key best practice for limiting an organization’s cyber vulnerabilities. Since systems don’t ship securely, it’s important to review and implement recommended guidance.
GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a good free alternative to Photoshop from Adobe and comes with numerous professional editing functions for images and photos. Here we learn the ways to install GIMP on Rocky Linux or AlmaLinux 8.
The selection and assembly technique is solid. The program offers all selection tools. The retouching functions and contrast correction also meet high demands. In just a few steps, you can crop images, free up sections or undo changes. To carry out complex edits, you can create layers in the GIMP on which you can work separately.
Getting quick screenshots or retouching and editing photos, graphics, and images for the Internet – all of this is possible with the GIMP. The program offers all selection tools.
Just like photoshop, the user can use retouching functions and contrast correction to meet high demands, and even Photoshop PSD files with layers can be easily opened by the GIMP.
One of the popular package managers of macOS is Brew that we can also use on Linux operating systems such as Ubuntu, easily. Whereas Brew Cask extends Homebrew with support for quick installation of applications.
Many of us are vaguely familiar with the levels of hell described in Dante’s epic poem from the 14th century, even if we’ve never visited ourselves. It’s natural to wonder in which circle of hell one might end up, but that’s a question that [scubabear’s] arcade build seeks to answer.
A usual mixture of games that have native builds, along with some that work well in Steam Play Proton. Some older native ports probably work better with Proton though.
You might be looking at what deals to grab on Linux as there’s a short window for Halloween right now with special sales going on. We have a quick list for you below, based on reliable price history and good Linux compatibility (either Native or working well with Proton). We hope you find this useful! Have a great time.
The Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of TDE R14.0.11.
TDE is a complete software desktop environment designed for Unix-like operating systems, intended for computer users preferring a traditional desktop model, and is free/libre software. Born as a fork of KDE 3.5 back in 2010, TDE is now a fully independent project with its own personality and development team, available for various Linux distros, BSD and DilOS.
The Trinity Desktop Environment as a decade-old project that forked from the KDE 3.5 desktop continues persevering bit-by-bit to improve this once widely enjoyed desktop environment.
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.0.11 is the new release out today for this KDE 3.5 fork. Notable with the new release is improved support for running on high resolution displays, new TWin styles of SUSE2 and DeKorator, improved FFmpeg support, Kopete video support improvements, Konqueror weather bar improvements, a working KNemo back-end, and a wide variety of other fixes and usability enhancements and UI refinements.
For adding subtitles to your video, the Gnome Subtitles editor released v1.7.1. Here’s how to install it in Ubuntu 16.04, 18.04, 20.04, 21.10 via PPA.
Gnome Subtitles is a free and open-source subtitle editor for Linux. Without using a heavy video editor app, this simple tool allows to add subtitles & captions to your video with preview, timing synchronization, translation, spell checking support and more.
It has been two years since the last release, Gnome Subtitle 1.7 (and 1.7.1 with quick fixes) was released with support for Enchant 2, AbiWord’s spell-checker with updated API/ABI.
In our previous episode, I wrote a high level overview of apk’s differences verses traditional package managers, which many have cited as a helpful resource for understanding the behavior of apk when it does something different than a traditional package manager would. But that article didn’t go into depth in enough detail to explain how it all actually works. This one hopefully will.
Nitrux 1.7 release brings fresh Plasma desktop, the latest kernel and applications. We round up the release with a quick review.
I have made a new version of ExTiX – The Ultimate Linux System. I call it ExTiX 21.11 LXQt Live DVD. (The previous LXQt version was 21.5 from 210516). ExTiX 21.11 is based on a pre-release (not even BETA) of Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish)! Ubuntu 22.04 will be supported until 2027. The best thing with ExTiX 21.11 is that while running the system live (from DVD/USB) or from hard drive you can use Refracta Snapshot (pre-installed) to create your own live installable Ubuntu system. So easy that a ten year child can do it! One other very good thing with this version of ExTiX is that it is quite light. The ISO file is of only 1580 MB, which means that you can run the system super fast from RAM. When the boot process is ready you can eject the DVD or USB stick. Use Boot alternative 3 or Advanced options… >> load to RAM. IMPORTANT NOTE: Since this version of ExTiX is based on a pre-release of Ubuntu you shouldn’t use it for sensitive work/business. Having said that I must also say that I haven’t found any “bugs” or so. Maybe it’s because ExTiX 21.11 uses the stable LXQt 0.17 DE (and not the more complicated Gnome DE or KDE DE).
antiX-21 (Grup_Yorum) is based on Debian Bullseye and is fully systemd-free.
As usual we offer the following systemd-free flavours for both 32 and 64 bit architecture, running sysVinit or runit. The 32 bit versions use a non-pae kernel.
antiX-full (c1.4GB) – 4 windows managers – IceWM (default), fluxbox, jwm and herbstluftwm plus full libreoffice suite. x64 versions come with 2 kernels. Legacy 4.9 and Modern 5.10
antiX-base (<<800MB – fits on 800MB cd) – 4 windows managers – IceWM (default), fluxbox, jwm and herbstluftwm.
antiX 21 arrives more than five months after antiX 19.4 and brings a fresh new base from the repositories of the latest and greatest Debian GNU/Linux 11 “Bullseye” operating system series.
Of course, in the tradition of the antiX and MX Linux distributions, the new release doesn’t ship with the systemd init system, nor the libsystemd0 library that provides interfaces to various systemd components.
Calibre is meant to be a complete e-library solution. It includes library management, format conversion, news feeds to ebook conversion as well as e-book reader sync features. Updated to 5.31.1
Caprine is an unofficial and privacy-focused Facebook Messenger app with many useful features. Updated to 2.55.0.
Now, you can try Ubuntu in your web browser with any operating system before installing it on your PC. Yes, you heard it right and it has been made possible with the release of Ubuntu Online 21.10. Ubuntu Online works both online and offline.
Ubuntu Tour’ Web Browser can’t render all pages in your browser because of Content Security Policy (CSP).
Everyone needs a little kick in the pants to stay motivated every now and then. With so many of us working from home, where bosses aren’t looking over our shoulders, that is truer now than ever before. Hardware Unknown’s Focus Flower gives that kick in the pants in the form of liquid motivation blasting your face.
Focus Flower’s operation is as simple as possible. When it’s time to start a new task, push the big red “easy” button. A bigger will begin its countdown, giving you a set amount of time to complete your task. Once you do, push the button again for a congratulatory auditory back pat. But if you don’t complete the task in time, that innocuous potted plate on your desk will shoot a jet of water at you. It’s good ol’ fashioned negative reinforcement.
[Geyes30]’s Raspberry Pi project does one thing: it finds arbitrary text in the camera’s view and reads it out loud. Does it do so flawlessly? Not really. Was it at least effortless to put together? Also no, but it does wonderfully illustrate the process of gluing together different bits of functionality to make something new. Also, [geyes30]’s kids find it fascinating, and that’s a win all on its own.
The device is made from a Raspberry Pi and camera and works by sending a still image from the camera to an optical character recognition (OCR) program, which converts any visible text in the image to its ASCII representation. The recognized text is then piped to the espeak engine and spoken aloud. Getting all the tools to play nicely took a bit of work, but [geyes30] documented everything so well that even a novice should be able to get the project up and running in an afternoon.
Having launched the Raspberry Pi Zero W in 2017 as an upgrade to 2015’s Raspberry Pi Zero, Raspberry Pi Foundation has now unveiled its latest offering, the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W. In this article, we will compare the specifications of the Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W against its predecessor, the Pi Zero W. If that’s something you are interested in, read on to learn the differences between Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W vs Raspberry Pi Zero W.
3D printers and laser cutters helped make adapters and homing teeth. A Raspberry Pi replaced the old laptops and they scaled up to a few machines.
The Raspberry Pi Zero 2 W is powerful for a computer the size of a matchbox, but get a Pi 4 or Pi 400 if you want a better desktop experience
KrakenRF has launched a new project via the Crowd Supply website for their new KrakenSDR phase-coherent software-defined radio with five RTL-SDRs.
It’s been several years since I first reviewed the original Raspberry Pi Zero W, so what’s changed and what’s it good for?
Software and corporate teams use computers to get tasks and projects completed within the required timelines. In theory, computers are supposed to make task completion faster, efficient in a more organized manner. However, computers don’t necessarily improve our output without several manual tweaks of available software to match a team’s workflow needs.
Workflow management involves a series of well-defined tasks, steps, the input of data, and sequentially processing to achieve results such as task completion in a project. In essence, workflows represent the mechanism of getting work done. Each team has its own preferred best practices to get the job done. For example, the developer team can employ methodologies like Agile, Waterfall, or DevOps principles to achieve desired goals.
The article will highlight some of the best free and open-source workflow management software.
As a twenty year old single male I think it’s very hard to find a girl who’s actually interested in free software. I’ve had girls jokingly ask to “Netflix and chill” but when I tell her that I don’t use Netflix since Netflix requires proprietary software to stream content, they stop talking to me.
Customers of a large advanced-electronics manufacturing business were having trouble finding and ordering products on the company’s website. The solution? Customer service told them to email their orders to their sales reps, who would then enter them into the site themselves. The email orders were inevitably unclear, leading sales reps to spend endless hours searching for products, clarifying the orders, and inputting the wrong information. Not only that, but top sales reps were spending their time doing basic fulfillment, not selling.
Materialise has partnered with aircraft part distributor Proponent to explore how 3D printing could help aerospace OEMs.
Libre Space Foundation, which has a lab in the center of Athens, designs and develops space technology with the use of open software
[...]
“We went numb,” Manthos Papamatthaiou, the president of the Libre Space Foundation (LSF), tells Kathimerini when he remembers the great ball of fire they saw on their screens. “Even if you are aware that it is a possibility, we had put a lot of work into it and everything was in place to receive signals from orbit. According to our calculations, the satellites would have made their first pass of over Greece in the afternoon of the same day.”
[...]
He also notes a parallel trend that is being seen internationally in the aerospace sector, which their team represents. Their organization supports the free sharing of information through open source code and software that are exchanged on the internet at no cost, free of intellectual property rights. “We believe that everything should be done with the purpose of spreading knowledge and the peaceful use of space, to broaden humanity’s horizons,” concludes Papamatthaiou.
There are both advantages and disadvantages of open source software. Price is not the only factor, although it may seem quite an important one at first glance. In this article we will look at both the advantages and the disadvantages of open source software.
[...]
Ultimately, we all have to make our own decisions about open source software. There has been resistance in the past but these days even major enterprises like Amazon have converted to open source. This is the direction that the industry is going and maybe turning your back on open source is like the fabled King Canute standing on the beach commanding the tide not to come in.
Espressif has recently announced that both Zephyr and NuttX open-source real-time operating systems had gotten official support for the ESP32 series of WiSoCs.
It’s been a long time in the making, and when I first tried the community developer port of Zephyr OS on ESP32 in 2018 it did not work well at all, and I could not even make the blink LED sample work on Wemos Lolin32 board, and the WiFi sample would not even build. But time has passed, Espressif Systems started to officially work on Zephyr in 2020, and now I/Os, WiFi, and some other features work on Zephyr and NuttX RTOSes.
GridGain® Systems, provider of enterprise-grade in-memory computing solutions powered by the Apache® Ignite® distributed database, today published the conference schedule for the 2021 Ignite Summit: Cloud Edition, a free virtual event for the global Apache Ignite community, taking place November 16, 2021. Featuring expert speakers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, IBM and GridGain, the 2021 conference is intended for developers, architects and members of the Apache Ignite community who use or are interested in using Apache Ignite to tackle speed and scale challenges in cloud environments. Registration for the virtual event is open to anyone, anywhere in the world.
PostgreSQL and MySQL are the two top database management systems. Besides, the two are open-source relational databases meaning they can be used for free, and their code is also freely available. Multiple commercials and in-house applications use PostgreSQL and MySQL.
PostgreSQL, commonly known as Postgres and MySQL, has been around for a long time. Both RDBMSes are secure, and they support network fault tolerance and clustering. However, despite all the similarities, some elements help differentiate the two database management systems.
Let’s look at what is PostgreSQL and MySQL?
The Free Software Foundation of Tamil Nadu (FSFTN) condemned the State’s implementation of Facial Recognition System (FRS) and said it was an abuse of an individual’s right to privacy.
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“The system enables the police to capture the faces of people and compare them with the records of the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network and System (CCTNS) to identify a potential criminal. The CCTNS has records from almost 14,000 police stations across India with around 5 lakh photos of criminals,” said FSFTN in a press statement. It added that the system breaches an individual’s privacy as there is no basic standard operating procedure in place for its usage.
Much of the release notes for the newly arrived GIMP 2.99.8 covers continuous integration changes. While it might be a boring topic for you, especially if you are in the “DO WANT FEATURES” camp, this is actually great. Here is why.
If someone fixed a bug that annoyed you or implemented a new feature that you really wanted, you can now test this on your operating system of choice and provide feedback to both the contributor and GIMP developers before they cut a release or sometimes even before they merge a fix or a feature into main development branch.
It’s a kind of a big deal when you think how much folklore is rooted in a belief that GIMP developers don’t listen to users.
Speaking of which, you can now use clone tools on multiple layers. The feature was requested and sponsored by Gleb Alexandrov of Creative Shrimp. His use case is working on multiple maps of the same material in a photoscanning workflow.
The GNU Debugger (GDB) has landed native support for OpenRISC on Linux and GDB server support.
Merged this week to the GDB Git code was native support for OpenRISC “or1k” and GDB server support. This native support builds off earlier OpenRISC code within the GNU Debugger.
GnuCash is accounting software designed for individuals and small businesses, and was initially conceived as an open source alternative to apps such as Intuit’s Quicken.
Social networking provider Mastodon is threatening to sue Donald Trump’s upcoming social media platform for allegedly misusing Mastodon’s open-source computer code.
On Friday, Mastodon announced it had sent a formal letter to Trump’s “Truth Social” platform, demanding it comply with the open-source license for Mastodon’s computer code within 30 days. If Truth Social doesn’t, then Mastodon could sue the platform for copyright infringement, according to Mastodon founder Eugen Rochko.
The dispute centers on how Trump’s “Truth Social” platform appears to rely on Mastodon’s open-source computer code to power the site. A test version of Truth Social went live earlier this month and users immediately noticed it adopted several design elements from Mastodon’s software.
Back in February 2020 SDL2 began seeing early work for RISC OS support. Now being merged this weekend to this key library used by many cross-platform games is now more functioning support for the RISC OS Arm-based operating system.
Last year was just the basic support for building SDL2 on Arm OS while merged overnight was keyboard input support, a barebones RISC OS video driver, mode-switching support for RISC OS, and also mouse input support. It’s more functioning support for the Simple DirectMedia Layer 2 code to actually be somewhat useful now on RISC OS should any games or other software want to also target that platform.
Deception is a powerful resilience tactic that provides observability into attack operations, deflects impact from production systems, and advises resilient system design. A lucid understanding of the goals, constraints, and design tradeoffs of deception systems could give leaders and engineers in software development, architecture, and operations a new tactic for building more resilient systems—and for bamboozling attackers.
Unfortunately, innovation in deception has languished for nearly a decade because of its exclusive ownership by information security specialists. Mimicry of individual system components remains the status-quo deception mechanism despite growing stale and unconvincing to attackers, who thrive on interconnections between components and expect to encounter systems. Consequently, attackers remain unchallenged and undeterred.
This wasted potential motivated our design of a new generation of deception systems, called deception environments. These are isolated replica environments containing complete, active systems that exist to attract, mislead, and observe attackers. By harnessing modern infrastructure and systems design expertise, software engineering teams can use deception tactics that are largely inaccessible to security specialists. To help software engineers and architects evaluate deception systems through the lens of systems design, we developed a set of design principles summarized as a pragmatic framework. This framework, called the FIC trilemma, captures the most important dimensions of designing deception systems: fidelity, isolation, and cost.
Developers sometimes distinguish “embedded” as a special kind of software development. Maybe different than categories like “web” or “apps”. Is it really? In the end, writing software looks very much the same.
There are aspects which have significant effect on the development process but it makes sense to differentiate six aspects.
Most of the platforms we use to communicate with each other online are tied to a single provider. But there’s no technical reason for things to be this way. There are ways to chat online that offer a greater degree of privacy and freedom. Matrix is one of those ways.
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The Matrix.org Foundation describes Matrix not as a protocol but as a decentralized conversation store. There is no single point of failure, such as a centralized server, in Matrix. When you communicate with someone, the data is shared among all the servers, with users participating in the conversation. If your server goes down, the conversation can still go on elsewhere until your server goes back up.
This is an effort to democratize communication. Each server has equal ownership over conversations and self-sovereignty over user data. These servers can be self-hosted at home or on a virtual private server or hosted by an organization, company, or community. This contrasts with all major commercial platforms, such as Discord, where the company owns the servers that everyone connects to and, as a result, all of the data. And if those servers go down, no one can communicate.
That’s not where the contrasts stop. While someone on Twitter can’t send a direct message to someone on Facebook, Matrix is interoperable by design. You can set up your Skype account, your Discord account, and your Slack account so that no matter where someone sends you a message, you see them in your Matrix client, and you can respond to any of them from one place. Matrix refers to this functionality as bridging.
In a world that is now gradually adopting HTTP/3 (which, as you know, is implemented over QUIC), the problem with the missing API for QUIC is still a key problem.
There are a number of existing QUIC library implementation now since a few years back, and they are slowly maturing. The QUIC protocol became RFC 9000 and friends, but the most popular TLS libraries still don’t provide the necessary APIs to make QUIC libraries possible to use them.
The cremation process destroys a lot of information that can usually be obtained from the human skeleton. Especially diseases are difficult to observe. This has caused a paucity in our knowledge of the disease load in populations that practiced cremation as their main funerary ritual. Dr. Barbara Veselka and professor Christophe Snoeck, of the Brussels Bioarchaeology Lab and research groups MARI and AMGC for the first time have detected vitamin D deficiency in cremated human remains.
Veselka said: “The results from our study represent a major step forward in the fields of biological anthropology, archaeology, and palaeopathology by opening up a variety of new possibilities for the study of health and activities related to sunlight exposure of numerous past populations that practiced cremation as their funerary ritual.” The study was published in the renowned academic journal Scientific Reports.
There are a huge number of available keyboards out in the world these days, catering to all of the plainest and the most advanced desires. However, if you want something that’s just right, sometimes it pays to build your own. [Zach] did just that.
One of the key features of [Zach]’s build is that it diverges away from the Cherry MX switch form factor. The design uses low-profile switches instead, which help with keeping the keyboard low enough to avoid it causing wrist problems. The keyboard also uses IO expanders to hook up all the key switches, helping to reduce the incidence of ghost keys. The board can also be split in half, allowing it to be repurposed as a smaller macropad when desired.
In May 2020, two months after covid-19 shut down schools and public life around the world, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey announced that he was giving $10 million to California’s Oakland Unified School District to purchase 25,000 Chromebooks. Dorsey tweeted that his donation was intended “to give EVERY single child in Oakland access to a laptop and internet in their homes.” The donation came just a day after Oakland mayor Libby Schaaf announced the #OaklandUndivided campaign to raise $12.5 million to “close the digital divide for good” in the city.
Oakland’s school district, along with much of the world, certainly needed the help. Despite the city’s proximity to Silicon Valley’s centers of power and wealth, 71.2% of its children qualified for free or reduced-price school lunch the year the pandemic hit. Half did not have the computers and internet connections needed to enable a sudden switch to remote learning. These numbers reflect nationwide trends. Lower-income households are much less likely to have broadband; over one-quarter rely solely on their smartphone’s metered internet connection, and many share one dilapidated computer. In August 2020 a picture of two young girls sitting on a dirty sidewalk outside a Taco Bell in Salinas, 100 miles south of Oakland, using the restaurant’s public internet connection to attend class on their school-issued laptops, went viral as a potent symbol of how difficult the pivot to remote learning had been for many students and how wide the digital divide continued to be.
Human respiration takes in oxygen and in turn, we exhale carbon dioxide. Thus, an uptick of carbon dioxide levels around us can indicate we’re in the presence of other humans, and also, perhaps, the pathogens they carry. To explore this phenomenon, [C Scott Ananian] developed a mod for the Watchy open-source smartwatch, which lets it detect carbon dioxide.
[Zach Armstrong] presents for your viewing pleasure a simple guide to building a solid-state Tesla coil. The design is based around a self-resonant setup using the UCC2742x gate driver IC, which is used in a transformer-coupled full-wave configuration for delivering maximum power from the line input. The self-resonant bit is implemented by using a small antenna nearby the coil to pick up the EM field, and by suitably clamping and squaring it up, it is fed back into the gate driver to close the feedback loop. Such a setup within reason allows the circuit to oscillate with a wide range of Tesla coil designs, and track any small changes, minimizing the need for fiddly manual tuning that is the usual path you follow building these things.
Since the primary is driven with IGBTs, bigger is better. If the coil is too small, the resonant frequency would surpass the recommended 400 kHz, which could damage the IGBTs since they can’t switch much faster with the relatively large currents needed. An important part of designing Tesla coil driver circuits is matching the primary coil to the driver. You could do worse than checkout JavaTC to help with the calculations, as this is an area of the design where mistakes often result in destructive failure. The secondary coil design is simpler, where a little experimentation is needed to get the appropriate degree of coil coupling. Too much coupling is unhelpful, as you’ll just get breakdown between the two sides. Too little coupling and efficiency is compromised. This is why you often see a Tesla coil with a sizeable gap between the primary and secondary coils. There is a science to this magic!
This blog post is a summary of some research I’ve been doing into relaying Kerberos authentication in Windows domain environments. To keep this blog shorter I am going to assume you have a working knowledge of Windows network authentication, and specifically Kerberos and NTLM. For a quick primer on Kerberos see this page which is part of Microsoft’s Kerberos extension documentation or you can always read RFC4120.
But critics say that methodology has a fundamental flaw. If the police are unsure whether a gunshot has been fired, they are not going to tell the company it was wrong.
In other words, say critics, the company has been counting “don’t knows”, ‘”maybes”, and “probablys” as “got it rights”.
Chicago defence lawyer Brendan Max says the company’s accuracy claims are “marketing nonsense”.
The cloth, imprinted with the Apple logo in the corner, is made with “soft, nonabrasive material” to clean the screens of iPhones, iPads and MacBooks “safely and effectively,” according to the product page. The listing adds that the Polishing Cloth — capital P, capital C — is “compatible” with 88 different Apple products. For most U.S. shoppers, shipment is delayed until Jan. 11, at the earliest.
Charging $19 for a piece of cloth about the size of two stacked dollar bills is bold even by Apple’s standards, a company whose legions of loyal customers are conditioned to stomach steep prices. An Apple-branded set of four wheels to “improve mobility” for the Mac Pro, the company’s most expensive desktop computer, is priced at $699, for instance.
InetSoft Technology, a pioneer in data intelligence, analytics, and reporting, announced the general availability of its 2021 release of Style Intelligence. The focus of the release is on IT and BI administrators making the deployment and updating of InetSoft’s BI platform easier and less resource-intensive. The top advances in this area are the addition of support for clustering options using Docker containers and Kubernetes.
Elastic, the software company that offers a range of popular search, logging, security, observability, and analytics products, is either a gold-standard open source success story or an embodiment of the issues of commercial open source, depending on who you speak to.
Alongside the Eclipse Foundation are several top industry players that are joining the foundation’s open source collaborative effort including Microsoft, Red Hat, Bosch, and others.
October brings four zero-day exploits and 74 updates to the Windows ecosystem, including a hard-to-test kernel update (CVE-2021-40449) that requires immediate attention and an Exchange Server update that requires technical skill and due diligence (and a reboot). The testing profile for the October Patch Tuesday covers Windows error handling, AppX, Hyper-V and Microsoft Word. We recommend a Patch Now schedule for Windows and then staging the remaining patch groups according to your normal release pattern.
You can find more information on the risk of deploying these Patch Tuesday updates in this infographic.
Linux and its derivative software like Ubuntu or Debian will have the least number of viruses.
The latest SolarWinds hackers’ cybersecurity attack on 140 Microsoft IT resellers and service providers with as many as 14 successfully breached is yet another wake-up call for the beleaguered Microsoft partner community, said partners.
Microsoft could not gloat, as the company saw 5 successful exploits of Windows 10 and one for Exchange, while Google saw two exploits for Chrome.
This week, MEPs recognised the dangers of certain uses of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in criminal justice. A strong majority rallied around the landmark AI in criminal matters report by the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE) committee, which opposes AI that ‘predicts’ criminal behaviour and calls for a ban on biometric surveillance.
And yet when it comes to Europol – the European Agency for police cooperation, we are facing an astounding silence from the majority in the same LIBE committee. As things stand, the parliament looks set to vote on a proposal by the European Commission on Thursday (21 October) to further extend Europol’s ever-increasing powers (the latest round was only in 2019).
Effectively, this would give Europol a blank cheque to use or further develop high risk artificial intelligence and data analytics tools.
This appears to be in complete contradiction to the committee’s own position on the use of AI in criminal matters.
The zero-day is in the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P, networking component that comes bundled with Tails to encrypt web traffic and hide a user’s real IP address. The 30,000 I2P users who previously felt anonymous could be unmasked, their true IP address revealed, by visiting a booby-trapped website.
The most recent finding concerns a complex, heavily encrypted networking program called the Invisible Internet Project, or I2P. Used to send messages and run websites anonymously, I2P ships along with the specialized operating system “Tails,” which former U.S. spy contractor Snowden used to communicate with journalists in secret.
The inquiry will be conducted by a three-member technical committee constituted by the court and its functioning will be overseen by Justice R V Raveendran, a retired judge of the Supreme Court, who will be assisted by two other experts.
The committee has been asked to conduct the inquiry and submit its report to the Supreme Court “expeditiously”. The matter will be heard again after eight weeks.
In the face of recent whistleblower revelations about Facebook’s inaction towards hate speech and misinformation, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged the startling series of whistleblower allegations.
During Facebook’s Q3 earnings call on Monday, Zuckerberg claimed that the recent leaks surrounding Facebook were part of a “coordinated effort to selectively use leaked documents to paint a false picture” of Facebook and its subsidiaries.
Richard Errington clicked to stream a science-fiction film from his home in Britain last month when YouTube carded him.
The site said Mr. Errington, who is over 50, needed to prove he was old enough to watch “Space Is the Place,” a 1974 movie starring the jazz musician Sun Ra. He had three options: Enter his credit card information, upload a photo identification like a passport or skip the video.
As an eyewitness, I can recall the events of January 6 in Washington as if they were yesterday. The crowds of angry loyalists storming the building while overwhelmed security guards gave way. The slavishly loyal vice-president who would, the president hoped, restore him to power. The crush of media that seemed confused, almost overwhelmed, by the crowd’s fury. The waiter who announced that the bar had run out of drinks and would soon be closing…
Three years after it took place, the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue in Squirrel Hill manages to feel like both ancient history and a still-burning flesh wound.
A recent sanctions case against a Maryland prosecutor — one involving a murder case and the use of crime scene forensic “science” — highlights the real world effects of the FBI’s tendency to overstate the certainty of forensic findings in court. It also highlights another long-running problem in the justice system: the withholding of exculpatory evidence by prosecutors who seem willing to take any “win,” whether it’s earned or not. (h/t Steve Klepper)
If world representatives at the UN climate conference in Glasgow put talk into action, we could forestall the worst impacts of the rapidly accelerating climate crisis. But we have to look beyond the Conference of the Parties — COP26 this year. If agreements under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are undermined through other international structures, we could face a grim future.
The Green Party of the United States today slammed President Biden and Congressional Democrats for apparently agreeing to slash funding for fighting climate change in their “Build Back Better Plan” to $30 billion a year. That figure amounts to 1/25 of the budget for the U.S. military, the world’s biggest consumer of oil.
The task of training an effective cadre of biodiversity scientists has grown more challenging in recent years, as foundational skills and knowledge in organismal biology have increasingly required complementary data skills and knowledge. Writing in BioScience, Dr. Anna K. Monfils, of Central Michigan University, and colleagues identify one way to address this training conundrum: biodiversity collections. Biodiversity collections operate at the nexus of foundational biological practice and contemporary data science, a product of their role as curator of not only specimens themselves but also the specimens’ associated data and network of data resources (referred to as the extended specimen).
The authors describe a module that leverages this feature of biodiversity collections to produce a holistic student learning experience. The module, “Connecting students to citizen science and curated collections,” was designed by the authors with six learning goals in mind, ranging from plant specimen collection in the field to the deposition of data in national or international databases. Students also learned about the value of large data sets and the role of community members’ contributions to them.
The Build Back Better Framework released this morning by President Biden is a total capitulation to conservative Democratic Senators Manchin and Sinema.
The $6.1 trillion program Biden announced in his American Jobs and American Families plan has been cut to less than a third of what he proposed. Proposals that are overwhelmingly popular with the public like repealing the Trump tax cuts, paid leave, and Medicare negotiating lower drug prices with Big Pharma have been eliminated. What remains are social programs with lower benefits, privatized administration, and means testing that complicates administration and adds administrative costs. The climate spending that remains makes no mandates for greenhouse gas emission reductions and are mostly corporate welfare subsidies for the big fossil fuel and manufacturing corporations that dominate the solar and wind markets. These subsidies will continue the pattern of the past decade where renewables have only added to total energy production while fossil fuel energy has increased.
Staunch progressive Nina Turner has some dire warnings about the current political moment coupled with applause for what her allies both in and outside of Congress have been able to accomplish since they helped elect President Joe Biden last year.
But first, a little context.
For the past two days, I have been watching the extradition hearing for Julian Assange via video link from London. The United States is appealing a lower court ruling that denied the US request to extradite Assange not, unfortunately, because in the eyes of the court he is innocent of a crime, but because, as Judge Vanessa Baraitser in January concluded, Assange’s precarious psychological state would deteriorate given the “harsh conditions” of the inhumane US prison system, “causing him to commit suicide.” The United States has charged Assange with 17 counts under the Espionage Act and one count of trying to hack into a government computer, charges that could see him imprisoned for 175 years.
The findings into the inquest of Iranian refugee Omid Masoumali, who died on Nauru in 2016, will be handed down in Brisbane tomorrow. Witnesses to the self-immolation of Omid included UNHCR staff, children, nurses and other detainees. Asylum seeker advocate Jane Salmon reflects on the journey that got us here, and diminished us all.
A historic decision, this united strategy was based on the many shared values between the Green and the Peace and Freedom political parties. Among these values are guaranteed access to healthcare, also known as expanded and improved Medicare For All, truly affordable housing, union-wage jobs, public ownership of energy, ending wars for profit, and a comprehensive climate plan, including a just transition to 100 percent renewables.
The Greens also criticized the Democrats for scaling back investments in social and economic programs needed to help Americans recover from the COVID-19 pandemic and for failing to address income inequality and immigration reform. The Green Party said the Republicans’ position is even worse, as they continue to deny the reality of climate change and block funding on climate action or social improvements.
“The United Nations and the IPCC have repeatedly sounded the alarm that time is rapidly running out for the radical action needed to prevent climate collapse. But President Biden and Senate Majority Leader Schumer are more interested in coddling Senator Manchin and his donations from and investments in fossil fuels than they are in providing the chance of a decent future for Americans,” said 2021 Green Party candidate Kearni Warren, who is running for the City Council of Chester, PA. Since Manchin has been in the Senate, he has made more than $5 million from his investments in coal.
The Green Party, which began calling for a Green New Deal in 2010, has advocated for $2.7 trillion in annual funding in solutions for the climate crisis while eliminating the false climate solutions promoted by the Democrats such as carbon capture technology, biomass and nuclear. Even mainstream climate groups allied with the Democrats, like the Sierra Club, have cited the need for at least $1 trillion a year in climate funding.
A historic decision, this united strategy was based on the many shared values between the Green and the Peace and Freedom political parties. Among these values are guaranteed access to healthcare, also known as expanded and improved Medicare For All, truly affordable housing, union-wage jobs, public ownership of energy, ending wars for profit, and a comprehensive climate plan, including a just transition to 100 percent renewables.
A series of documents leaked by former Facebook employee-turned-whistleblower Frances Haugen have revealed that the platform let hate speech and misinformation spread unchecked, despite being aware of it.
The documents, which are being called ‘The Facebook Papers’, detail multiple notes and studies conducted in India since February 2019, including one with a test account to check Facebook’s recommendation algorithm and how it exposed users to hate speech and misinformation.
The diversionary nature of the accusations against Facebook—a social media platform with nearly 3 billion active users worldwide that is not responsible for monitoring the activity of the right wing—is exposed as soon as one asks the question: What were the Democrats and their media representatives doing before, during and after January 6? What warnings were they issuing to the public about the obvious plotting of a right-wing coup by the Trump White House and what have they done about it since?
It is now more than nine months since the insurrection in Washington D.C. and, despite the publication of substantial detailed evidence about who was involved, the Democrats have not prosecuted a single leading official for their criminal actions. In reality, the campaign for government intervention and regulation of Facebook is part of the ongoing effort to cover up the full implications of the assault on democratic institutions in the US on January 6.
The trial date for the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) versus Muhammad Gohir Khan has been set for Jan 11, 2022 with the trial expected to last two weeks.
Gohir Khan, born on Feb 16, 1990, was charged on June 28 with one count of conspiracy to murder Goraya.
When I was in Law School, among the most revered legal opinions were those by Judge Learned Hand of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. They were precisely reasoned, not verbose, and reflected a very cultivated sense of justice, in the judgment of my law school professors. We were, nonetheless, encouraged to critique them in class.
The controversial practice allows the government to seize people’s property – even without filing criminal charges – if it is suspected of being linked to criminal activity.
Supporters of civil forfeiture argue that it’s an essential law enforcement tool against drug traffickers, who are known to use cars and planes to ship large amounts of cash around the country. Critics say it’s routinely used against innocent people and disproportionately impacts people of color.
Challenging a civil forfeiture can be a long and costly affair, leading many to walk away from items such as cash and cars.
Warren won his case with the help of lawyers from the Virginia-based nonprofit Institute for Justice.
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) co-founder John Gilmore has been removed from any active role on the digital rights organisation’s board but will continue to serve as emeritus member.
“Since he helped found EFF 31 years ago, John Gilmore has provided leadership and guidance on many of the most important digital rights issues we advocate for today,” wrote EFF executive director Cindy Cohn.
If your instincts tell you that’s the kind of prose that presages a “but”, your instincts were correct.
“But in recent years, we have not seen eye-to-eye on how to best communicate and work together, and we have been unable to agree on a way forward with Gilmore in a governance role. That is why the EFF Board of Directors has recently made the difficult decision to vote to remove Gilmore from the Board.”
The EFF announcement adds that the board is “deeply grateful for the many years Gilmore gave to EFF as a leader and advocate, and … has elected him to the role of Board Member Emeritus moving forward”.
Cohn’s post doesn’t outline the nature or particulars of the dispute that led to Gilmore’s departure. The EFF appears not to publish board minutes, nor to have posted its constitution or charter to its site (but does advocate for transparency), making it hard to ascertain why Gilmore was removed or the powers that made it possible to do so.
New episodes will be released fortnightly and feature many of your favourite APNIC Blog authors and others who’ve built and are improving the health of the Internet. And who better to kick off the show than APNIC’s Chief Scientist, Geoff Huston, who will be expanding on his recent post about Facebook’s October outage.
The Librarian of Congress approved exemptions to copyright law that greatly expand right to repair, if we can get the parts.
New copyright exemptions have gone into effect today that could help promote the right-to-repair movement…
From the moment kids log onto Instagram for the first time, the app is collecting information about their interests, habits, and identity. Powerful online platforms gobble up this data and use it to pump toxic, attention-grabbing content to screens—with full knowledge of the vulnerabilities of children and teens. This pernicious Big Tech business model of targeting kids early, according to its own research, leads to depression, body-image issues, and even suicidal thoughts.
Some countries offer utility model protection in addition to patent protection. In practice, however, utility model protection plays only an insignificant role, or even no role in an application strategy. Even applicants who regularly file utility models and are familiar with its protection per se, typically consider utility model protection only when a small invention is involved.
Patents are critical to the life sciences industry and often spark intense and heated debate. To be successful, one key strategy that should be pursued by life sciences companies is building and maintaining a patent portfolio capable of distinguishing itself from competitors, as well as representing a well-reasoned business strategy. Companies should secure their patent assets by maximising patent coverage of the core technology and its potential improvements. One reason is that patents can demonstrate the commercial potential of a company’s technology, they are also the driving force for major events in the lifecycle of a life sciences company, among them:
National Dutch and European patents are governed by the Dutch Patent Act 1995. The act and the courts have sought to harmonise Dutch patent practice with the European Patent Convention (EPC).
Dutch national patents are automatically granted through a registration system, without undergoing substantive examination.
HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has recently published annual statistics relating to the UK’s Patent Box tax relief scheme. The update covers the tax year from 2018 to 2019 and indicates that 1,405 companies claimed relief under the Patent Box, with the total value of relief claimed being £1,129 million. This shows an ever increasing value of relief claimed – the value of relief claimed has increased year on year from its introduction in tax year 2013 to 2014. However, it appears that the rate of increase has slowed. There is a time lag for reporting the statistics as companies must notify HMRC within two years after the end of the accounting period in which the relevant profits and income arise.
One interesting point to note from the statistics is that, of the companies that claimed in tax year 2018 to 2019, 28% were classified as ‘Large’, but these companies accounted for most of the relief claimed (92%). Thus, although there may be a large number of SMEs claiming for tax relief, it appears that large companies are claiming for the vast majority of the tax relief by value.
For these numbers, I aggregated all opinions filed with each decision. The leading decision appears to be Aqua Products, Inc. v. Matal, 872 F.3d 1290 (Fed. Cir. 2017) with several hundred “patent” repeats across the four opinions in that en banc decision.
For the sake of cost and the broadest protection scope, European applicants generally file an application in which a multiple dependent claim depends on another multiple dependent claim, as allowed by the European Patent Office.
However, when a PCT application based on a European application enters China or when an application claiming priority of a European application enters China through the Paris Convention, one of the primary formality issues that an applicant often encounters is claims being objected to as multi-dependent claims, in which multiple dependent claims refer back to multiple dependent claims.
A judgment of 7 July 2021 from the Spanish Supreme Court has been published, which, as discussed below, following the case law from the EPO’s Boards of Appeal, introduces certain guidelines for assessing whether or not an invention is sufficiently described.
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The Court of Appeal sided with the defendant, which had questioned the sufficiency requirement on the grounds that claim 1 mentioned as a characterising element that the first coat of varnish be “low grammage” and that the following coat(s) of varnish have “higher grammages than the initial coat”. The defendant held that the precise grammage had to be specified, i.e. the grams of varnish per square meter of surface of the panel, the reference contained in the claim therefore being insufficient.
Based on the evidence examined, the court of first instance concluded that the invention only worked, i.e. only reached the solution to the proposed technical problem, when the first coat had between 8 and 16 grams per square meter and the second between 100 and 150 grams and that problems arose if that range was exceeded.
The complainant then filed an “extraordinary appeal for breach of process” (i.e breach of due process) and a “cassation appeal” (i.e. breach of law) before the Spanish Supreme Court. In the first appeal, it alleged that the Court of Appeal’s assessment of the evidence had been arbitrary. The Supreme Court dismissed this appeal, noting that, though in exceptional circumstances the Supreme Court may quash decisions when the assessment of the facts has been arbitrary, the assessment of sufficiency is a legal assessment (not a factual assessment) and, as such, must be challenged via a “cassation appeal”, which the complainant also did. It should be noted in passing that Spanish civil procedure law is extraordinarily formalistic. Consequently, choosing the wrong framing can result in the automatic dismissal of the appeal.
There’s no better day of the year for a story that’s truly creepy–and, actually, abhorrent. There was a patent case in Germany that reached its final resolution a few weeks ago, but only after creating a crisis that cost 60 people their jobs and made dozens of families suffer. That case brought out the very worst in some people. It’s hard to find anything to do with the case that doesn’t simply suck.
After this unmitigated disaster, I believe the Federal Court of Justice of Germany needs to realize that it has a responsibility to be more receptive to those pesky petitions for enforcement stays, and the folks over at Quinn Emanuel Germany should ask themselves how they’re going to succeed again with brilliant fair play (like a decade ago), as I’ve seen them underperform and employ a couple of highly questionable tactics in recent years.
The one who would stand the most to learn from this, however, is Dusseldorf-based Judge Thomas Kuehnen (“Kühnen” in German), and my recommendation to him is to seek early retirement now that his astonishing misjudgment, which has had such catastrophic consequences, has been put into evidence. He should also turn over the editorship of his book on German patent litigation to some other judge or a professor. His reputation is never going to recover from this. He will always be remembered as a job-killer judge and a “do as I write, not as I do” type of guy. This inexcusable legal error marks the bitter and embarrassing end of an era.
‘Stereochemistry’ is the study of spatial arrangements of atoms in a molecule. A molecule may be similar in chemical makeup to another molecule, however, the spatial arrangements of atoms in these may differ. Molecules so related are called as stereoisomers.
Enantiomers exist as subsets of these stereoisomers, where, the spatial arrangement of the chemical molecules in these stereoisomers exist as mirror images of each other. For a better understanding, one can think of left right hand, which cannot be superimposed over one another.
On October 28, 2021, the Enlarged Board of Appeals released the full text of the Decision G1/21 that concerns the admissibility of oral proceedings via video conference against the expressed will of the parties.
The European Patent Office has, starting with the travel restrictions after the outbreak of the corona virus in Europe, initiated a pilot program to hold oral proceedings in examination and opposition proceedings as video conference. Moreover, the rules of procedure of the Board of Appeals were amended and allow to hold oral proceedings in Appeal proceedings via video conference at the discretion of the deciding Board of Appeal. Thus, the rights of the parties of the proceedings were restricted. Shortly after the implementation of the new rules, the legality of the new rules was questioned by a referral to the Enlarged Board of Appeals, the highest instance at the European Patent Office.
On 4 October 2021, the Dutch court granted an ex-parte AASI against Apple for five days. This was to protect any potential legal proceedings Ericsson initiated against Apple in the Netherlands. Then an inter-parte oral hearing followed on 8 October 2021, in which Apple rebutted the previously-granted ASI.
Here, the preliminary relief judge decided not to maintain the provisional AASI measure until the main proceedings later in November. During the oral hearing, Apple stated that it had never before requested an ASI and has no intention of doing so in the current dispute. As such, presiding judge Brinkman lifted the AASI, judging there to be no threat by Apple against Ericsson to justify an AASI for the remainder of the preliminary relief proceedings.
An oral hearing in main proceedings will take place in the middle of November, meaning a chance remains that the judge could indeed grant Ericsson’s requested AASI. While Germany was previously in the limelight for its ASI activity, eyes are now on the Dutch courts in case of future moves by Apple.
Currently litigation between the parties is ongoing in the US. JUVE Patent is unaware of parallel proceedings in other European countries.
The SACEPO Working Party on Guidelines (SACEPO/WPG) met on 28 October to discuss the latest draft EPC and PCT-EPO Guidelines, which will come into effect in March 2022, with a preview version available as from February.
During the constructive dialogue consensus was found on many different aspects of the procedures before the EPO, including changes relating to inventions on artificial intelligence – a topic the Office would like to expand upon in the Guidelines for 2023. All participants were very satisfied with the outcome of the discussions.
In keeping with the latest remote-working culture, the Office has now enabled the production of EPO badges for professional representatives by pre-arranged video call. During the call the professional representative will need to show their passport or national ID card. The badge will then be produced and sent by mail to them. The EPO badge enables professional representatives to identify themselves in oral proceedings and consultations (by videoconference or on site) and to access EPO premises, e.g. rooms for oral proceedings, as well as the canteens and coffee bars.
Despite the pandemic bringing the world to a standstill in 2020-2021, Germany has worked hard at both the legislative and judicial level to continue protecting IP rights. The past 18 months has seen the first legislative reform to its patent law in more than a decade, and the plentiful rulings of the Federal Supreme Court have provided clarity, not only in areas of patent law, but also in supplementary protection certificates and FRAND licensing.
An IP helpdesk for businesses operating in African countries is a welcome development, but on-the-ground legal changes are also preferable, say sources
Winston & Strawn attorney Kathi Vidal would bring experience as a litigator who has represented both sides in patent disputes to the helm of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
The Supreme Court has decided on a patent case for the first time this century. The Supreme Court constitutional challenge (ADI 5529) filed against the patent term adjustment has brought unfortunate news for patent owners. The patent term adjustment provision was considered unconstitutional and was subsequently revoked by the Brazilian Congress from the patent law (Law #14,195/2021). The court also urged Congress to enact a new patent term adjustment with more specific criteria.
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There is no doubt that the decision on ADI 5529 is a backlash against the Brazilian patent system – it heightens insecurity, leaves questions unanswered and fails to bring solutions for INPI’s backlog and pendency. Although the Supreme Court’s decision was a blow to the legal certainty of patent owners and applicants in Brazil, there is still hope for the Brazilian patent system.
First, a new set of patent term adjustment rules may be voted for by the legislative branch. The Supreme Court decision does not limit the possibility of proposing bills on the subject. Congress will observe that one of the main points of discussion by the justices was that the unconstitutional provision was applied automatically. Different mechanisms may be considered by the legislators to fill the gap created by the Supreme Court and recover the protection for patent applications that suffer from INPI’s pendency.
Second, INPI’s examination backlog is continually decreasing, as a plan has been adopted to solve it using foreign research reports in Brazilian examination. INPI still has serious structural problems, which will be resolved only with further investment and good governance. While this continues not to be the case, applicants must rethink their patent prosecution strategies to identify every opportunity to expedite their Brazilian patent applications.
Patent prosecution highway programmes and administrative fast-track options are already in place and should be considered as a main tool to avoid INPI’s inefficiency. Applicants should also consider the judicial fast-track, through which the applicant seeks a judicial order to compel INPI to start examination of one or more patent applications immediately. This option is well accepted by the courts, which consider the pendency time unreasonable and frequently order INPI begin examination within 60 days.
Also, the recent publication of Law #14,195/2021 (August 27, 2021) revoked Article 229-C from the Brazilian Patent Statute. The Article established Brazilian’s FDA (ANVISA) prior approval as a step in the patent prosecution administrative procedure, which caused many delays in patent applications. The revocation can potentially benefit pending applications, reducing pendency times in the procedure – and, consequently, help to improve INPI’s backlog.
Small Pharma Inc. (TSXV: DMT) (OTCQB: DMTTF) (the “Company” or “Small Pharma”), a neuropharmaceutical company focused on psychedelic-assisted therapies, today announced that it has received European patent grant number EP 3 463 323 as acceptance for its European patent application No. 17 728640.8. The patent grants certain protections for oral dosage forms of a range of 2R,6R-hydroxynorketamine (“6-HNK”) based compounds, including the Company’s preclinical candidate SPL801B, for the treatment of depressive disorders.
In Mobility Workx, LLC v. Unified Patents, LLC, the Federal Circuit in a split decision concluded that Mobility Workx, LLC’s constitutional challenges to structure and funding of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) are without merit, but remanded the case to the Acting Director to determine whether to grant rehearing in view of the decision in United States v. Arthrex, Inc., 141 S. Ct. 1970 (U.S. 2021).
After Mobility sued T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless in the Eastern District of Texas alleging infringement of U.S. Patent No. 8,213,417 (the “’417 patent”), Unified Patents filed a petition for inter partes review (“IPR”) alleging that claims 1-7 of the ’417 patent are obvious in view of certain prior art references. The PTAB issued a final written decision finding that claims 1, 2, 4, 5 and 7 of the ’417 were unpatentable as obvious, while claims 3 and 6 of the patent were not shown to be unpatentable. Mobility appealed the PTAB’s decision and on appeal raised for the first time constitutional challenges to the structure and funding of the PTAB . The Federal Circuit stated that it had authority to hear constitutional challenges because, based upon precedent, “agencies generally do not have authority to declare a statute unconstitutional” and the Federal Circuit has “discretion to consider new arguments for the first time on appeal.”
Intellectual property specialists who want to develop fulfilling and high-flying careers should seize opportunities, not let detractors get them down, and “be nice to everyone” according to a circuit judge and private practice and in-house legal professionals.
Speaking on the plenary panel at the AIPLA 2021 Annual Meeting yesterday, October 28, Kara Stoll at the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, Angela Sebor at Tolmar, Andrea Evans at Evans IP Law and Robert Stoll at Faegre Drinker delved into how they got to where they are in their careers.
Panellists, including the litigators representing Google and Oracle, set out their views on the Supreme Court case
This short post reports on one of the Panel Sessions at this year’s AIPPI Congress which took place virtually for the second year in a row.
The tenth panel session of the AIPPI Online World Congress 2021 addressed global FRAND determinations by national courts and out-of-jurisdiction judgments in the form of anti-suit and anti-anti-suit injunctions. The panel was chaired by Peter Damerell (Powell Gilbert), who was joined by Clemens-August Heusch (Head of Global Litigation and Disputes, Nokia) and Kevin Duan (Han Kun Law Offices). The panel started off by discussing the UK Supreme Court judgment in Unwired Planet v Huawei[1], noting that this decision is generally held responsible for the direction that national courts are taking in determining global FRAND terms. It was inevitable that other courts would follow suit and this is being seen in the Chinese courts in particular. In turn, these decisions have been a catalyst for anti-suit and anti-anti-suit injunctions over the past couple of years.
The Supreme Court has not granted a writ of certiorari in any patent cases this term, and has now denied certiorari in two dozen. Still, there are a number of important cases pending that could be transformative if granted.
Bayer AG said its blood-thinner Xarelto will be partly patent-protected through January 2026, citing a ruling from the European patent office.
Today, in G 1/21 the Enlarged Board of Appeal has determined that compulsory video conferencing is compatible with Article 116 of the European Patent Convention. However, according to the decision, “the Enlarged Board has limited the scope of its answer in the present referral to a period of general emergency.” As such, it has reframed the questioning to cover an emergency situation and as regard to the EBA.
The board deduced that Article 116 EPC does not explicitly refer only to in-person hearings in a courtroom. As such, according to an EPO press release, “The Enlarged Board of Appeal held that oral proceedings in the form of a videoconference are oral proceedings within the meaning of Article 116 EPC and are normally sufficient to comply with the principles of fairness of proceedings and the right to be heard under Article 113(1) EPC.”
Bayer (BAYGn.DE) on Friday said the European Patent Office had maintained the company’s patent for its best-selling stroke prevention pill Xarelto (rivaroxaban), extending the patent’s expiry date by almost two years.
Bayer said several drugmakers had opposed the drug’s patent but the EU authority extended Bayer’s intellectual property rights until January 2026.
Bayer on Friday said the European Patent Office had maintained the company’s patent for its best-selling stroke prevention pill Xarelto (rivaroxaban), extending the patent’s expiry date by almost two years.
IP rights, among other fundamental human rights, are introduced by the Russian Constitution and further detailed in Part IV of the Civil Code as the main civil rights legislation source (revised August 2021). At an international level, Russia is a party to most agreements and treaties on IP matters, including the Paris Convention, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights and the Eurasian Patent Convention (EAPC), among others. Examination and grant of industrial property rights are conducted by Rospatent, which functions as the Russian patent and trademark office and, in general, does not differ substantially from other main patent offices.
A granted patent for an invention certifies exclusive rights for the invention throughout Russian territory, thereby giving the patentee a right to authorise any commercial use of the patented invention during the whole patent validity term (ie, 20 years from the filing date). However, for patents relating to pharmaceuticals, pesticides or agrichemical inventions, the use of which requires special approval, this term is extendable for a maximum of five years.
This year, they have also obtained the European invention patent authorization certificate issued by the European Patent Office (EPO), and with their sub-company Caparol officially joining the German brand design committee, all of their ceramic tile adhesives obtaining the highest environmental protection certification of EC1plus in Germany.
Lipidor AB (publ) (Nasdaq First North Growth Market: LIPI) today announced that the collaboration agreement with Cannassure Therapeutics has expanded to include a new patent family covering new innovative AKVANO® topical compositions. Lipidor submitted the new patent application to the European Patent Office on 25 October 2021.
On the evening of the second day of the trial, in a surprise move the EPO Boards of Appeal have reinstated the dosing patent for Bayer’s thrombosis blockbuster drug, Xarelto. Until shortly before the decision in the evening, it was still unclear which way the trial would go.
This surprise decision is a major economic success for the German pharmaceutical company. The high-selling and high-value drug will have market exclusivity for another year and a half.
Yes, the non-patentable invention exemption to patent eligibility under Japanese law is similar to that found in most other countries. In the emerging technologies space (eg, AI and machine learning), business rules, mathematical expressions and coding for computer programs are excluded from patentable inventions. The list of exclusions is very similar to that of other patent offices (eg, the EPO (Article 53(2) and (3) of the European Patent Convention) and the USPTO (judicial exception)).
On October 26, 2021, Unified filed an opposition proceeding against EP 1869893 B1, currently owned by InterDigital. The EP ’893 patent is part of a family purportedly essential to HEVC and part of the Access Advance patent pool. This filing is a part of Unified’s ongoing efforts in its SEP Video Codec Zone.
The author was recently reminded of the opening lines of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic Dune: “A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.” This Dune tells us, every member of the secretive Bene Gesserit sisterhood knows. The author argues that copyright holders would do well to heed this wisdom before entering into litigation, as exemplified by a recent decision from the Swedish Patent and Market Court in case PMT 2401-21.
Modern copyright jurisprudence offers protection, not only to classical types of literary and artistic works such as books and movies (as an illustrious example, Denis Villeneuve’s new Dune adaption, in cinemas everywhere), but also to less inherently artistic and perhaps more mundane expressions of human creativity. As for the “amount” of expression needed to enjoy protection, famously as little as eleven consecutive words can in principle enjoy copyright protection as a protectable part of a work, as set out by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Infopaq, (C-5/08), recognized as the most consequential European copyright decision of the last decade by this blog [Katpost here].
But sometimes even this arguably generous interpretation of what may constitute a work, or a protectable part thereof, may be pushed beyond its limits, as seen in for example Levola Hengelo, (C-310/17) when testing the legally creative notion that copyright could vest in the taste of cheese. These kinds of efforts to push the boundaries of what constitutes a work are on the one hand important, as they enable copyright to develop organically and with the times. On the other hand, these cases can sometimes end up looking more like lawsuits tilting at windmills, with little chance of success.
The case at hand concerned a Swedish supplier of a roof snow guard system, suing a Norwegian competitor. Not exactly the typical setup for an international copyright fracas even though it obviously snows a lot in the Nordics and city-dwellers are loathe to have to look up from their phones to avoid being hit in the head.
On 23 October 2021, the standing committee of the National People’s Congress, China’s top legislature, ratified the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled (hereinafter referred to as “the Marrakesh Treaty”). China signed this treaty as one of the initial signatory countries on 28 June 2013, at Marrakesh, Morocco.
The Marrakesh Treaty is one of the WIPO’s administered international copyright treaties. Adopted on 27 June 2013 and entered into force on 30 September 2016, it features ‘a clear humanitarian and social development dimension’ dedicated to protecting the right to read for the blind, visually impaired and otherwise print disabled people (VIPs).
As noted by the World Blind Union, the worldwide book famine for VIPs is severe, as they are unable to read over 90 per cent of all published materials. Materials need to be reproduced into accessible formats, such as braille, large print and audio editions which require exceptions to be added into current copyright rules. The Marrakesh Treaty seeks to ‘make the production and international transfer of specially adapted books for people with blindness or visual impairments easier’. This has been done by creating ‘a set of limitations and exceptions to traditional copyright law’. As of today, 83 contracting parties (109 countries) around the world have ratified or acceded to the Marrakesh Treaty.
[...]
This Kat is quite interested in the further discussions on the ‘authorised entity’. Article 2(c) of the Marrakesh Treaty defines the authorised entity as ‘an entity that is authorised or recognised by the government to provide education, instructional training, adaptive reading or information access to beneficiary persons on a non-profit basis. It also includes a government institution or non-profit organisation that provides the same services to beneficiary persons as one of its primary activities or institutional obligations’. China has only one National Braille Press. Considering the inflated cost of producing braille publications and the great benefit of enriching the variety of works, could granting market access to more non-profit entities help the beneficiary persons of the treaty? Then, how should the regulations be implemented? And how to balance the interests of multiple parties? The list of inquiries grows.
Implementing the detailed Marrakesh Treaty into the domestic legal governance framework will require compatible changes in many aspects. This will involve the CLC and its Regulation on the Implementation and a more comprehensive range of corresponding codes and regulations. The process has begun—Looking forward to seeing effective and timely access to the perceivable works and welfare to the persons in need.
Readers may remember from the IPKat in conversation with Tim Moss, CEO of the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) that the IPO is continuing their consideration of artificial intelligence (AI) and intellectual property, which launched last year with a call for views and Government Response on AI and IP.
[...]
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a transformative technology and is already revolutionising many areas of our lives. It can be a powerful tool for scientists, entrepreneurs, and artists, enabling new inventions and creations.
The Government wants the UK to be at the forefront of this revolution, to encourage innovation in AI technology and promote its use for the public good. At the same time, we want to preserve the central role of intellectual property (IP) in promoting human creativity and innovation.
The Government has previously sought views on the interaction of AI and IP and the impact of AI on the IP framework. Questions were raised about the balance in the copyright system between the protection of human works and AI works, and the use of copyright material in machine learning. For patents, issues were identified that could stifle innovation as the use of AI systems increases.
WIPO for Creators is an open public–private partnership launched by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) and the Sweden-based Music Rights Awareness Foundation. WIPO for Creators aims to raise awareness and increase knowledge of creators’ rights and related management practices, ensuring recognition and fair reward for all creators regardless of their geographical, cultural or economic conditions. Its first step is to launch a rights awareness platform with the aim of supporting creators worldwide across many different creative fields.
Advertising company Popads has hit back at the MPA after the Hollywood-backed group nominated the business as a “notorious market” that facilitates piracy. Several claims are false or misleading, PopAds counters, while summing up a long list of anti-piracy reporting options which appear to be largely ignored.
Seeding misinformation/falsehoods. EPO is not EU, so Reuters isn’t getting the very basic facts right; what can we expect from its Monsanto/Bayer reporting?
Syndicating misinformation/falsehoods.
Going overseas too (other continents). EPO becoming better known for endless monopolies instead of helping patients, choosing corporate patents instead.
This isn’t too bad, but it’s behind paywall and demands proprietary JavaScript/cookies. Moreover, the authors of that site (Bloomberg Law) were clearly hired for their patent maximalism (they recently added more of them). Reformist views are impermissible.
Instead of writing reports, nowadays JUVE does ads for patent litigation firms, disguised as news articles (this is their new business model). Most of this past week’s JUVE stories were just ads for law firms, thinly veiled as reporting/journalism (we intentionally omit links to those, but we’re keeping internal records).
A longtime mouthpiece of EPO dictators and Team UPC, Amy Sandys, does that usual hogwash about EPO corruption in G 1/21. No investigation of underlying facts required, just revisionism. That’s where the money is.
Summary: A look at the state of ‘journalism’ about patents and about the EPO specifically
By Benjamin Henrion, original licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Brussels, 31 october 2021 — FFII says the proposed Unified Patent Court is an SME killer with its super-expensive court fees of 20.000EUR. No small company will be able to defend itself if it is accused of violating a patent, the proposed UPC court fees will deny access to justice for small companies, the cost being 100X more expensive than the current situation in the different countries.
The claim that the Unitary Patent makes the system better for SMEs is a gigantic lie. Europe is committing an economic suicide by making sure the Court is not accessible to small companies.
Last week, business assocations members of BusinessEurope from Spain, Portugal, Hungary and Czech Republic refused to endorse a call to ratify the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA). Those business associations mostly share the same position that the UPC court fees of 20.000EUR (validity) and 11.000EUR (infringement) are way too high, and will deny access to justice for SMEs:
“The Confederation of Industry of the Czech Republic thus demands […] to reduce the court fees, especially the fee for patent abolition’s proposal, which is set at 20 000 euros. If a subject wants to abolish an EU patent on the territory of the Czech Republic now, the fee is approximately 200 times lower.”
— SPCR.CZ: The proposed level of fees is too high for the Czech companies, the Confederation states https://www.spcr.cz/en/23-aktualne/statesment/8743-confederation-on-the-unified-patent-court-fees
This is also the analysis of the Portuguese Association of Consultants in Intellectual Property (ACPI):
“UPC rules are unbalanced in favor of patent holders and costs of European patent litigation in the UPC will be very high and unaffordable for companies resident in Portugal, jeopardizing the right to a fair and equitable process.”
— ACPI: Patente Europeia de Efeito Unitário e Tribunal Unificado de Patentes violam princípios básicos da UE e prejudicam empresas Portuguesas http://www.acpi.pt/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/ConclusoesVIForum.pdf
The same position is also shared by the Spanish Confederation of Employers and Industries of Spain (CEOE):
“Litigation under the UPC will be unaffordable for SMEs. Just have a look at the very high court fees that have recently been proposed by the UPC Preparatory Committee. The fee for invalidation, for example, would be 20.000 euros. On top of that, you have the costs of lawyers, translations, etcetera.”
— Kluwer Patent Blog: Despite the defeat at the CJEU, Spain will not join the Unitary Patent system http://patentblog.kluweriplaw.com/2015/06/17/despite-the-defeat-at-the-cjeu-spain-will-not-join-the-unitary-patent-system/
Even worse, in some countries small companies can call for Legal Aid if they don’t have the means to pay the expensive lawyers fees, and the UPC has scrapped that support for SMEs, and restricted to physical persons only (individuals). For example, in Austria, legal aid is available for small companies.
Benjamin Henrion, President of FFII, says: “The Unified Patent Court court fees of 20.000EUR will prevent small companies to defend themselves, especially against patent trolls, which have most of the time very weak patents. The argument that the UPC is ‘cost-cutting’ is a giant lie and does not fly if a simple case is 100X times more expensive than a national case. Court fees in most member states are between 80EUR and 600EUR, except for Germany.”
He finishes: “Like for the European Electricity Crisis, Europe is designing a patent court system which is the most expensive, a disaster for small companies that will be denied access to Justice.” █
Latest statistics from Stéphane Bortzmeyer‘s bot, which is called Lupa
Summary: The October 2021 statistics show Techrights traffic more than doubling in just two months and we’ve just improved the capsule by regenerating all the pages in it (better conversions than the prior ones).
Today is the last day of the month, which means we’ve deleted all Gemini logs. With HTTP it happens automatically because of logrotate after 4 weeks. Our expectations of half a million page requests for October are nearly fulfilled.
“Unlike some other “small Internet” protocols, this one isn’t just a passing fad.”Gemini space grew from 441 known active capsules to 1,400 (more than tripling in number between the month of January and the end of October). I know some capsules of people that aren’t included in Lupa’s list, e.g. Gustav from our IRC channels. The real and complete number is likely a lot higher, definitely over 2,000 by now though some are ‘islands’ or sheltered in some intranet. The media barons like to speak of those as the “dark Web”; for Gemini, would that be the “black holes”, given that most things are named after space motifs/projects?
As a sign of the health of the community, consider the recent return of the founder. He’s looking to finalise everything by considering feedback from people and making only minor (cosmetic) changes that annul ambiguities.
Speaking of annulling ambiguities, this past week we updated the entire capsule (37,903 pages in total as of last night) to improve clarify and tidy up pages, based on code which we constantly improve. We’ve invested a lot of time and effort, seeing that the future of Gemini is potentially very bright. Unlike some other “small Internet” protocols, this one isn’t just a passing fad. █
He could have done far better
Summary: As noted this morning, Benoît Battistelli and António Campinos enjoy the support (for unlawful EPO proposals) from TürkPatent’s Habip Asan
Video download link | md5sum fad57b82a5372e72fdf42c76e6096186
Summary: Taking stock of all the supine officials who enabled the Battistelli regime and re still enabling the “Orange One”, we must recognise that there’s a profound institutional flaw and the EPO will remain dysfunctional until a major overhaul
IT SHOULD very frequently be emphasised that Benoît Battistelli basically 'bought' the election/position for EPO President, as did António Campinos when he pursued a top job at OHIM/EUIPO. Prior to that, Battistelli also wanted to become the chief of WIPO (and failed). But more importantly, those responsible for rinsing as well as enabling illegal acts are national delegates, who are admittedly easy to buy/rig; that’s how Battistelli rose to power in the first place, in the face of opposition even from French people who knew he was an unqualified sociopath. The patron of Battistelli was recently sentenced to prison for corruption and his bodyguard is in prison for violence. What they lack in experience and understanding they make up for by aggression.
“The problem is so profound that even a Turkish scientist in the patent office (and a former university professor) is willing to go along with the crimes.”This morning’s installment about Turkey names one of the longtime facilitators (of both Battistelli and Campinos), noting that even Norway failed to vote against an illegal proposal, despite knowing it should be ferociously opposed. Sadly, the EPO’s governance suffers a problem more profound than classic gerrymandering. As we noted in this morning’s meme, a constituent in San Marino has about 2,500 times more than a German constituent in terms of EPO voting power. That does not make sense at all and this is how we end up with unlawful actions being brushed under a rug (like the attacks on the EPO’s judges, which are nowadays compelled to accept European software patents and ‘ViCo’ as both essential and compulsory despite it being a constitutional violation). The problem is so profound that even a Turkish scientist in the patent office (and a former university professor) is willing to go along with the crimes. As we noted this morning, he (or his deputy) very well understands that what Battistelli did was unlawful.
Turkey is a large country, but that does not mean that it’s difficult for Battistelli and Campinos to control. Tomorrow we’ll show just how easy it is for them to control Monaco, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Iceland, and Malta. What’s considered ‘flush funds’ (to Germany or France at least, owing to size and economic might) can be a big economic boost to a small island of fishermen and tourism. Some of these microstates are so small that if you pack up each and every single citizen (including children and babies) in a very large stadium, they would only occupy a quarter of that stadium. █
San Marino “covers a land area of just over 61 km2 (24 sq mi), and has a population of 33,562,” according to Wikipedia, but in the EPO its vote counts as much as Germany’s
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
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