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10.10.16

Links 10/10/2016: GNOME 3.24 With ownCloud Integration, Bodhi Linux 4.0.0 Beta

Posted in News Roundup at 4:22 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Links xx/10/2016: Links for the day

GNOME bluefish

Contents

GNU/Linux

Free Software/Open Source

  • On the State of Open Source

    I was just a teenager when I got involved in the open source community. I remember talking with an old bearded guy once about how this new organization, GNU, is going to change everything. Over the years, I mucked around with a number of different OSS tools and operating systems, got excited when symmetric multiprocessing came to BSD, screwed around with Linux boot and root disks, and had become both engaged and enthralled with the new community that had developed around Unix over the years. That same spirit was simultaneously shared outside of the Unix world, too. Apple user groups met frequently to share new programs we were working on with our ][c’s, and later our ][gs’s and Macs, exchange new shareware (which we actually paid for, because the authors deserved it), and to buy stacks of floppies of the latest fonts or system disks. We often demoed our new inventions, shared and exchanged the source code to our BBS systems, games, or anything else we were working on, and made the agendas of our user groups community efforts to teach and understand the awful protocols, APIs, and compilers we had at the time. This was my first experience with open source. Maybe it was not yours, although I hope yours was just as positive.

  • OpenType 1.8 and style attributes

    In last week’s look at the new revision of the OpenType font format, we focused primarily on the new variations font feature, which makes it possible to encode multiple design “masters” into a single font binary. This enables the renderer to generate a new font instance at runtime based on interpolating the masters in a particular permutation of their features (weight, width, slant, etc). Such new functionality will, at least in some cases, mean that application software will have to be reworked in order to present the available font variations to the end user in a meaningful fashion.

    But there is another change inherent in the new feature that may not be as obvious at first glance. Variations fonts redefine the relationships between individual font files and font “families.” There is a mechanism defined in the new standard to bridge the gap between the old world and the new, called the Style Attributes (STAT) table. For it to work in a meaningful fashion, though, it must be implemented by traditional, non-variations fonts as well—which may not be an easy sell.

    There is no formal definition of a font family, but in general usage the term refers to a set of fonts that share core design principles and, in most cases, use a single name and come from the same designer or design team. The Ubuntu Font Family, for example, includes upright and italic fonts in four weights at the standard width, one weight of upright-only condensed width, and two weights (in upright and italic) of a monospaced variant.

  • An open source font system for everyone

    A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: ⯐. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.

    Five years ago we set out to address this problem via the Noto—aka “No more tofu”—font project. Today, Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.

  • Students Hacked a Chip to Give Your Smartphone a Sense of Touch

    Project Soli, which debuted at Google I/O in 2015, is a tiny chip that uses radar to detect discreet hand and finger motions. It was designed as a unique way to interact with mobile devices, but students at the University of St. Andrews found a way to use the simple chip to give electronics an actual sense of touch.

    The chip, developed by Google’s Advanced Technologies And Projects group, or ATAP, uses the same kind of radar as airports use to track arriving and departing planes. As radio waves bounce back to the Project Soli chip from your hand, the unique signals detected can be used to decipher even the tiniest of motions.

  • Caged Heat: Using Open Source in a Windows Workplace

    I work primarily with Windows but let me say that I, like many of you, have no choice in the matter. We don’t live in a world where the company tells us, “Well, here’s Microsoft Office and everything we do is on a web app. Have fun!” My goodness, that would be a relative paradise for many people. You could potentially go hog wild and use the applications you want.

    Still, a lot of us work with very clunky tools sometimes set on a gray-haired version of Java and birthed from Windows installers. It’s a sad reality that a lot of highly-specialized practice software applications, many of which attach to MICROSOFT databases, will only run on Windows because the developer is selling these apps for profit and not for fun. They also happen to know that 95% of the market is drenched in……Windows.

  • European Open Source Jobs Surge

    According to a recent report, European open source jobs may be more sought after and more rewarded than anywhere else in the world. These findings were a key feature in the results of The 2016 Open Source Jobs Report which was released by Dice, a career site for technology and engineering professionals in association with The Linux Foundation, the nonprofit advancing professional open source management for mass collaboration.

  • Multivendor & MANO Will Dominate NFV Discussions

    NFV management and network orchestration (MANO) is sure to be a hot topic at next week’s SDN & OpenFlow World Congress at The Hague, Netherlands. For many, MANO has been considered to be a roadblock to not only deploying network functions virtualization (NFV), but also to making NFV agile and efficient.

  • ETSI open source MANO work launches Release One stack

    ETSI continues to move on its open source MANO work in support of telecom NFV plans, releasing the latest OSM stack focused on VNF, SDN controller support

    The European Telecommunications Standards Institute’s Open Source MANO initiative continued to feed software into the management and orchestration community with the launch of its OSM Release One stack.

  • Open Source Forking Demystified: Threats and Benefits

    Two researchers, Gregorio Robles and Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona, from Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain, had embarked on a study of forks. Their paper titled “A Comprehensive Study of Software Forks: Dates, Reasons and Outcomes,” studied the sustainability of software projects in an open environment of sharing software. Key questions answered were—how many forks were in actual existence, was forking frequency increasing and understanding the root-causes for forking. Also, the researchers looked into the outcomes of forking—a point that may be of specific interest to CIOs. But first, let us understand what a fork truly means.

  • Rethink Robotics Leads in Research and Education with Open Source SDK

    Rethink Robotics today unveiled its high performance Sawyer robot for the global research and education markets. Built on the open source Robot Operating System (ROS) and equipped with a software development kit (SDK), Sawyer will help leading educators and researchers innovate in fields including machine learning, human-robot interaction, mechatronics and grasping, machine vision and manufacturing skills.

  • Open source in the enterprise: It’s about culture, not technology, says Github

    Collaboration platform provider gives its top tips on ‘inner source’, the idea of adopting open source software development principles within the enterprise

  • Transparency and Independence Drive Open-Source Adoption

    Open-source software is now not only acceptable; in many companies, it is required. In the past, enterprises looked at open source projects as if they were science experiments, lacking the support and “single throat to choke” in case of an escalation. But the tide has turned. It is now common to have one or more companies offering support on open source projects, enabling enterprises to not only get the same level of service formerly reserved for proprietary commercial software, but to also benefit from the vibrant communities surrounding open source projects.

    What are the benefits of community for the enterprise? Independence and transparency.

  • Tech Insider: Open source business models

    This week we’ll step back and revisit a few fundamentals of competition and cooperation and how this results in the open source ecosystem.

  • The power of open source is customer freedom

    The open source community is a diverse and fractious collection of individuals and organizations. In its infancy, in many ways it could be compared to the hippie movements of the ’60s: a lot of passion, a lot of fun, a lot of weirdness, and not a lot of organization. Over the last decade or so, it has evolved into a respected software development force that relies on the support of its members.

    As it’s grown and diversified over the last decade, it has gotten more mainstream in the sense that there are now many different players that are making quite a bit of money based on open source principles. It has more prestige and a lot more respectability. As they say, money changes everything.

    That’s what I was thinking as I read Max Schireson’s article, “The money in open source software,” on TechCrunch: how much things in the open source community have changed, and how much they have stayed the same. The article is a breakdown of how to plan for a profitable company based on open source software. It provides a lot of common-sense points: Have and stick to a business plan, pick a licensing model that makes sense, and maintain customer satisfaction. None of these are particularly earth-shattering ideas.

  • Events

    • Slides from Linuxcon Europe 2016
    • LinuxCon Europe 2016 – Veni, Vidi, Vici

      There we are. It feels like a dream. It happened too fast, and I did not get to absorb the full aroma of the conference. But never mind. There will always be another opportunity, and LinuxCon will be there next year, waiting, beckoning. Despite a somewhat less than perfect circumstances, I am quite happy. I enjoyed my session, if I’m allowed to say that, and I think I served my audience well, and their feedback was good and open. There is nothing that would have made it better except a little more time to network, talk to people, pilfer some more free shirts and electronics, and actually see the city.

      Anyhow, I hope you find these little field reports entertaining. And maybe we will meet somewhere next year, and you will come over and say, oh so you are that crazy guy, why are you not wearing a fedora huh? Indeed. 2017, so let the countdown begin. The Final Countdown. By a band called Europe. What can be more appropriate? OMG. See you next autumn.

  • Web Browsers

    • Mozilla

      • Get Better Firefox Look on Linux With These Extensions

        Firefox is one of the most used web browsers on the Web. According to Clicky, it holds around 20% of the global market share. Firefox is also installed by default in almost all Linux distributions. So it’s very likely to see Linux users using it all the time, although many other alternatives are available like Chromium and Epiphany.

        Since the web browser’s window is all what many of us see the whole day, you may want to customize its appearance. We are not talking about “personas” or those simple backgrounds that you put to colorize a small part of the browser’s window. We are talking about changing the theme totally. Firefox does this using “Complete Themes“.

      • Firefox sandbox on Linux tightened

        As just announced on mozilla.dev.platform, we landed a set of changes in today’s Nightly that tightens our sandboxing on Linux. The content process, which is the part of Firefox that renders webpages and executes any JavaScript on them, had been previously restricted in the amount of system calls that it could access. As of today, it no longer has write access to the filesystem, barring an exception for shared memory and /tmp. We plan to also remove the latter, eventually.

      • Mozilla is working on Form Autofill for Firefox

        Mozilla is currently working on bringing form autofill functionality to its Firefox web browser.

        Firefox remembers form data by default that you enter on sites, but the browser does not ship with options to create profiles that you may use on any form you encounter while using the browser.

  • SaaS/Back End

  • Databases

    • RethinkDB database shuts down as its business falters
    • Company Behind RethinkDB Is Shutting Down, Database to Remain Open Source
    • BigchainDB Moves On From End Of RethinkDB
    • RethinkDB is shutting down

      I just installed RethinkDB 2.3.5 on a new laptop and took a few minutes to slow down and play with the product. I’m very proud of what we built alongside our community – RethinkDB’s technology more often feels like magic, and I hope it will continue to play an important role in advancing the state of the art in database technology.

      We’re working with members of our community to develop a continuity plan for RethinkDB and Horizon. Both projects will continue to be available, distributed under open source licenses. We hope to continue our open development process with a larger community of contributors.

      We’d like your help to ensure RethinkDB’s future as an open-source project! We don’t have all of the details figured out, but we wanted to be as open as possible during this process. If you’re interested in contributing, please join us in the #open-rethinkdb channel of our public Slack group. You can expect to see development slow down in the meantime, but everything will continue to be available on rethinkdb.com and horizon.io. We will post updates on our blog and Twitter as we continue working things out.

  • Oracle/Java/LibreOffice

  • Pseudo-Open Source (Openwashing)

  • FSF/FSFE/GNU/SFLC

    • An Emacs Update

      It’s been a while I have not written about Emacs and more particularly my personal use case for Emacs. I started using Emacs because I was looking for a text editor capable of handling formats such as HTML and CSS; then I found out Emacs had quite convenient IRC clients and I could even use a bit of Org mode for project management. That was in 2013 and early 2014. As I was impressed by the seemingly infinite power of Emacs, I started using Org-mode more and more on a daily basis (something I still do today); and I started learning (e)lisp both in order to understand Emacs a bit more in-depth and because I wanted to start to learn a programming language.

      Remember: I’m no software developer. When I’m not maintaining or creating websites for friends, I’m not doing much else in the way of “coding”. My Emacs usage remains however a daily experience that I would like to share here.

    • Report: Bash Skills Pay Off the Most (Wait, Bash?)

      It’s not surprising that a new skills survey rounds up the usual list of suspects for the most popular programming language, naming JavaScript, Python, Java, et al.

      What is surprising is the list of skills that pay off the most in terms of developer salaries: Bash, Perl and Scala. Bash topped the list at about $100,000.

      Bash?

      I read a lot of these surveys, and the Bash scripting language rarely makes a strong appearance. But it leads the list of respondents’ stated median salaries by programming language in a new report from Packt Ltd. titled “Skill Up 2016″ (free download upon providing registration info) which garnered more than 11,500 responses.

      “We’ve now seen what languages are the most popular,” the report says, “but what languages are the most lucrative in 2016? Our data shows that languages favored by more experienced developers command the highest salaries; it pays to be a Perl Monk or a Bash Scripter. Scala developers also manage to command high salaries, while the more ubiquitous JavaScript and Python hover around the middle, as they are likely favored by both highly-paid and more junior alike. If you’re still working with Visual Basic or PHP, you might want to consider an upgrade.”

  • Public Services/Government

    • Russia may require use of open source software

      The Russian government is reportedly drafting a Bill that would require government agencies to prefer the use of open source software, as part of efforts to reduce its reliance on US vendors Oracle, Microsoft and IBM.

      Russia’s Lower House of parliament is working on legislation that would further prohibit the use of foreign software, Bloomberg reported.

  • Openness/Sharing/Collaboration

  • Standards/Consortia

    • The anatomy of a Vulkan driver

      Jason Ekstrand gave a presentation at the 2016 X.Org Developers Conference (XDC) on a driver that he and others wrote for the new Vulkan 3D graphics API on Intel graphics hardware. Vulkan is significantly different from OpenGL, which led the developers to making some design decisions that departed from those made for OpenGL drivers.

Leftovers

  • Hardware

    • Smallest. Transistor. Ever.

      For more than a decade, engineers have been eyeing the finish line in the race to shrink the size of components in integrated circuits. They knew that the laws of physics had set a 5-nanometer threshold on the size of transistor gates among conventional semiconductors, about one-quarter the size of high-end 20-nanometer-gate transistors now on the market.

  • Security

    • Cybersecurity: Complexity is Our Biggest Vulnerability

      Confucius once said, “Life is really simple, but we insist on making it complicated.” For those of us in cybersecurity professions, we can easily relate to this philosophy. Cybersecurity has become exceedingly complicated in recent years, and the complexity might now be our biggest vulnerability.

      IT is evolving rapidly, but IT security is often left playing catch up in order to adapt to the changes in how businesses approach and deploy computing, applications, networks, databases, and devices. Many organizations rely on best practices such as defense in depth, secure development lifecycle, penetration testing, separation of duties, etc. However, these tactics do not allow cybersecurity to move at business speed, and they contribute to the lag in IT security.

    • Open source software is best for IoT security

      Art Swift, president of the prpl Foundation, pointed to high profile IoT hacking attacks saying that “regardless of whether these hacks were malicious or simply done in the name of research, the fact is that it is possible today to hack into just about any connected device.”

      Swift says that hackers can reverse engineer, exploit a weak implementation, modify or re-flash the firmware, and then move laterally across the system.

  • Defence/Aggression

    • Syria no-fly zone would mean ‘killing a lot of Syrians’ warned Clinton in leaked speech

      The US former Secretary of State made the admission in a Wall Street speech in 2013.

      In the latest dump of classified emails, Mrs Clinton noted the problems with imposing a no-fly zone over Syria.

      She said: “To have a no-fly zone you have to take out all of the air defenses, many of which are located in populated areas.

    • How WWIII Can Start In The Last Place You Expect (And Soon)

      Hey America! Just checking in with another update on how a recent presidential election is going to doom us all! I’m not talking about the election that’s happening in this country right now. I will at some point, but it’s an election that happened thousands of miles away which deserves the bulk of our attention today. I’m speaking, of course, about the this year’s presidential election in the Philippines, where a legitimately crazy person named Rodrigo Duterte took control of the highest office of in a country of more than 100 million people. He’s said and done a lot of insane things since then, but if you’re only keeping track of the highlights, you probably have no idea just how insane things might get.

  • Environment/Energy/Wildlife/Nature

    • Hillary Clinton Expresses Support For Fracking In Wikileaks Document

      During the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton cast herself as a skeptic of hydraulic fracturing — the controversial process to extract natural gas. But newly released documents purporting to show excerpts of her paid speeches show that Clinton proudly touted her support for fracking, which environmental groups say can pollute groundwater and undermine the fight against climate change. The excerpts also show Clinton saying that some environmental organizations trying to restrict her work to promote fracking were front groups for Russian oligarchs.

      The transparency group Wikileaks published the document as part of what it says is a tranche of emails from John Podesta, Clinton’s campaign chairman. Podesta has refused to say whether the excerpts are authentic but has not denied their authenticity, either.

  • AstroTurf/Lobbying/Politics

    • EXCLUSIVE: New Email Leak Reveals Clinton Campaign’s Cozy Press Relationship

      Internal strategy documents and emails among Clinton staffers shed light on friendly and highly useful relationships between the campaign and various members of the U.S. media, as well as the campaign’s strategies for manipulating those relationships.

      The emails were provided to The Intercept by the source identifying himself as Guccifer 2.0, who was reportedly responsible for prior significant hacks, including one that targeted the Democratic National Committee and resulted in the resignations of its top four officials. On Friday, Obama administration officials claimed that Russia’s “senior-most officials” were responsible for that hack and others, although they provided no evidence for that assertion.

      As these internal documents demonstrate, a central component of the Clinton campaign strategy is ensuring that journalists they believe favorable to Clinton are tasked to report the stories which the campaign wants circulated.

      At times, Clinton’s campaign staff not only internally drafted the stories they wanted published but even specified what should be quoted “on background” and what should be described as “on the record.”

    • Two-Faced Hillary: Clinton Says She Has ‘Both a Public and a Private Position’ on Wall Street: WikiLeaks Release

      Hillary Clinton told top banking executives that she has “both a public and a private position” on Wall Street reform and is reliant on wealthy donors to fund her campaign, leaked excerpts of the former first lady’s speeches seem to show, fueling claims of hypocrisy on the part of Mrs. Clinton at a crucial moment in the presidential campaign.

  • Censorship/Free Speech

    • Youtube took down MEP’s videos about torture debate

      Marietje Schaake (previously) is a Dutch Member of the European Parliament who has a fantastic track-record for getting it right on issues related to technology, free speech, human rights, and privacy; she is the author of a report on export controls for spying technology used to identify dissidents to torture.

      She uploaded the videos from the debate about these tools to Youtube, only to receive a notice from Youtube informing her that a video had been removed had been reviewed and found to be in violation of Youtube’s standards, resulting a takedown for the video and a “strike” against Schaake’s Youtube account — enough of these strikes and she’ll permanently lose access to the service.

      The video that Youtube removed “included footage of European Trade Commissioner Cecila Malmstrom, who gave her opinion about the new law.”

    • When YouTube took down my video

      YouTube is now one of the most used platforms for videos online. It has over a billion users, and reaches more 18-49 year-olds than any cable network in the U.S. It has become a portal for sharing information and ideas, which is vital for any democratic society.

    • Russia Mulls Downloading Fines if Site Blocking Fails

      Faced with the possibility that website blocking may not achieve its goals, Russia is now considering fresh opportunities for decreasing online file-sharing. Sources familiar with negotiations say that authorities are mulling a system of fines which would target individual downloaders.

    • Internet Bill: Censorship or internet regulation?

      The Films and Publications Amendment Bill that was deliberated by the Portfolio Committee on Communications in Parliament last week has caused an uproar as people debate whether it is strictly an internet regulation or the government’s attempt at stifling and censoring freedom of speech.

      Also known as the Internet Bill, the proposed law aims to regulate the online distribution of digital films and digital games, among others, but it has come under attack from media organisations such as Multichoice, organisations such as the Right2Know campaign, and opposition parties such as the DA.

  • Privacy/Surveillance

    • The Fog of Cyber War

      A version of this post originally appeared in the Cyber Saturday edition of Data Sheet, Fortune’s daily tech newsletter.

      Last week produced a spate of cyber-security news, including revelations about Yahoo (again) and lousy counter intelligence at the NSA (again). But if there is a common thread, it’s that first reports often are false or incomplete and the story is not what it seems.

      Take the brouhaha over Yahoo using software to feed emails to the NSA. The news led to hyper-ventilating among privacy types and predictable high-horse behaviorf rom rival tech giants like Google and Microsoft. But as my colleague Robert Hackett explained, a lot of this fulminating took place before anyone really knew the facts — which are still emerging in dribs and drabs.

      Meanwhile, journalists (me included) breathlessly reported another security lapse at Edward Snowden’s old stomping groups, Booz Allen, which led the FBI to arrest a contractor for stealing secrets. But now it turns out the guy was probably just a kook and a hoarder. It’s still not a good situation but it sure doesn’t look like the stuff of a John LeCarre novel.

      Part of the trouble, from a media perspective, is that a lot of the incidents we learn about are delivered by anonymous sources and wrapped in national security laws. This makes it hard to verify information — easy to jump to conclusions.

      So call it the fog of cyber war. In an era where everyone is amped up about cyber attacks, a lot of first impressions are tinged with paranoia and misinformation or are just flat out wrong. I don’t know what to do about this except to say that, as with other dramatic events like mass shootings, it’s best to take first reports with a giant grain of salt.

    • Facebook Crowned Privacy Villain Of 2016 By European Privacy Rights Group

      A European civil society group defending rights and freedoms in the digital environment awarded Facebook the Belgian Big Brother Awards 2016 yesterday.

      The awards are based on a concept created by European Digital Rights initiative (EDRi) member Privacy International, and are negative prizes for “the worst privacy abuser.” The goal of those awards is to draw attention to violations of privacy, they said in a press release.

      The Belgian award was “unanimously granted to Facebook by the professional jury,” and the public confirmed Facebook’s title as the “ultimate privacy villain of the year.”

    • Yahoo May Have Exposed Rogers Customer Emails to US Spies

      On Friday, Motherboard reported that beleaguered US company Yahoo allowed someone—possibly a US intelligence agency such as the NSA or FBI—to install a backdoor on its servers, likely for scanning purposes, that afforded unfettered access to Yahoo’s systems, including users’ personal emails.

      “This backdoor was installed in a way that endangered all of Yahoo users,” a source familiar with the incident told Motherboard.

      This should concern Canadians, because Rogers, one of the largest telecom companies in the country, totally outsources its email systems to Yahoo. Emails sent from Rogers accounts are sent to Yahoo’s US servers for storage and processing, and Yahoo scans Rogers emails for spam, malware, and child pornography.

      This isn’t the first time that Rogers’ ties to Yahoo have compromised Canadians: The Toronto Star previously reported that Rogers customer data was included in the massive hack in September.

    • U.S. pressed to disclose secret court’s order on Yahoo email search

  • Civil Rights/Policing

    • Iranian judges sentence writer to jail for story about stoning to death

      Iranian judges have ordered a young female writer and activist to serve a six-year jail term for writing an unpublished fictional story about stoning to death in her country.

      Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee received a phone call on Tuesday from judicial officials ordering her to Evin prison in Tehran, where her husband, Arash Sadeghi, a prominent student activist, is serving a 19-year sentence.

      Ebrahimi Iraee told Voice of America’s Persian network this week that she had been sentenced to five years in prison for insulting Islamic sanctities and one extra year for spreading propaganda against the ruling system.

      “They haven’t issued a written summons [as required by the law],” she said in a Skype interview. “They called me using the telephone of one of my friends, Navid Kamran; they had gone to his shop to arrest him and they called me from there to summon me.”

    • Leaflet ‘handed out at east London mosque’ tells Muslims to kill all who insult the prophet

      Police today launched a hate crime probe after literature saying those who insult Islam “must be killed” was allegedly handed out at a London mosque.

      A Standard investigation has uncovered claims that the booklet, which says “any Muslim should kill” those who insult the Prophet Mohammed, was distributed at a gathering in Walthamstow.

      It points to a classical manual of Islamic law to justify killings without waiting for court judgments and says apostates “deserve to be assassinated”.

      The booklet discusses the case of Mumtaz Qadri, a fanatic who murdered a governor in Pakistan in 2011 because of his support for liberal reforms to the country’s strict Islamic laws.

    • Final hearing for Christian woman facing execution for blasphemy in Pakistan

      A Christian woman who has been facing execution in Pakistan for six years after being accused of blasphemy has been granted her final appeal.

      Pakistan’s supreme court will hear the case of Asia Bibi, a mother-of-five from the rural village of Ittan Wali in Punjab, eastern Pakistan, who was convicted of blasphemy in 2010 after allegedly insulting the Prophet Muhamed during a row with other women over water.

      All of Ms Bibi’s appeals in the lower courts failed before the supreme court temporarily suspended her execution in July 2015 ahead of a fresh hearing now scheduled to be heard on 13 October.

      If her final appeal fails, Ms Bibi will be the first woman to be executed under the country’s controversial blasphemy laws.

    • Mormon Rebel Went to WikiLeaks for Help

      When Kate Kelly, founder of the Mormon feminist group Ordain Women, was accused of apostasy, she couldn’t readily access the Church Handbook of Instructions, Volume 1, for the definition. So Kelly and Nadine Hansen, a lawyer representing her in her hearings, had to turn elsewhere.

      “The only way that women can access that volume is by accessing it online at WikiLeaks,” Kelly told The Daily Beast.

  • Intellectual Monopolies

    • Gurry investigation dropped by WIPO member states; transparency and accountability are the losers

      The news that WIPO member states have endorsed a decision taken by the organisation’s Coordination Committee to drop any further investigation of the allegations of serious misconduct levelled against the organisation’s Director-General Francis Gurry is no surprise; a few days ago this blog predicted it would happen. However, for anyone who believes that the IP system is best served by transparency and accountability, the fact this outcome was so predictable does not make it any less depressing.

      Ever since the then WIPO deputy Director-General James Pooley first accused Gurry of being involved in taking WIPO staff members’ DNA and in interfering to alter the outcome of a procurement process in his April 2014 Report of Misconduct, IAM has taken no position on the claims. We don’t know if they were true; but we do know that they should have been investigated quickly, thoroughly, independently and with full protection for witnesses.

    • WIPO Workshop: African States Are Themselves To Blame, Should Compile, Publicize IP Statistics

      Each year, the World Intellectual Property Organization Economic and Statistics Division sends out questionnaires, which intellectual property offices worldwide are expected to complete and return.

      But because the survey is voluntary, many African countries, including some Africa Regional Intellectual Property Organisation (ARIPO) member states, do not respond to the questionnaires.

    • EU, US negotiators officially drop aim of concluding TTIP in 2016

10.09.16

Towards the End of Patent Trolls-Friendly Courts in the United States

Posted in America, Patents at 6:12 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

USPTO panel

Summary: Texas and its epidemic of patent trolls (owing to trolls-friendly courts) may be enjoying its last months of exploitation and the patent law firms that are based there might soon need to relocate

THE USPTO is moving in the opposite direction of the EPO (which pursues the UPC). Tomorrow we’ll publish a lengthy and detailed post about the FTC study, but today — in preparation for that — we shall remark on another aspect.

A recent article by Annalee Newitz spoke about Lee Cheng, who made a name for himself by fighting patent trolls to death and even compelling them to pay Newegg’s legal fees after the trolls had lost (a lengthy and expensive process). Newegg was praised here in the past for this (one example among half a dozen from last year) and ““Patents are bullshit,” says Newegg legal chief” is the headline of this new article. To quote from it:

Lee Cheng is one of the few attorneys to fight back against patent trolls and prevail. And at the latest Ars Live event, we talked to him about his most famous case, how people can fight patent trolls today, and what the future of patent abuse will look like in coming decades. His answers, as expected, were incredibly candid and hilarious.

In 2007, a patent troll known as Soverain had already gotten millions of dollars out of The Gap and Amazon for their online shopping cart patent when they hit Newegg with a suit. Cheng’s colleagues in the legal community said you’d better just pay up—this patent is legit. Cheng didn’t see it that way. Newegg had just reached a billion in sales, and he thought this piece of litigation would be the first of many lawsuits brought by companies that wanted a piece of Newegg’s success. And sure enough, soon after the shopping cart claim, Newegg was hit with patent claims on several aspects of online search. Cheng decided he wasn’t going to lie down and take it. He thought he could win on appeal if he could just make it through the courts in the Eastern District of Texas, where 40 percent of patent infringement claims are brought.

Remember that Newegg got dragged down to Texas, and notably the Eastern District of Texas, which is probably the world's most notorious (globally). It actually advertises its bias that favours litigants with abstract patents. That’s why many companies and trolls file their patent cases in there. On the fifth of October we saw United for Patent Reform stating that “85% of the 33 patent lawsuits filed today were filed by patent trolls. It’s time for Congress to take action to #fixpatents!”

How many of these were filed in Texas?

Patent Progress wrote that “The Eastern District of Texas Is Still Home for Patent Trolls” (also under the #fixpatents hashtag) and pointed to this new article from Mr. Levy (cross-posted at the Huffington Post). To quote some bits:

The year is mostly over, so I thought I would take a look and see what’s going on in the Eastern District of Texas. The Eastern District of Texas still has more patent cases filed there than any other district at 1,224. Some 794 (that’s about 8% of all patent cases) of those cases were assigned to Judge Rodney Gilstrap, in the Marshall Division — almost 10 times more than any judge outside the Eastern District. That’s more than twice as many as the entire District of Delaware (311 cases), even though most big companies are incorporated in Delaware.

In fact, Judge Gilstrap, a judge in a small town in Texas, is handling about as many patent cases as Delaware, California, Illinois, and New Jersey combined.

Marshall, Texas has a population of about 25,000 people. It has no major research facilities, no major industries, and has not produced any major innovations that I can identify. And yet it hosts more patent litigation than any other place in the country, by an order of magnitude.

I’m sure Marshall is a charming town with nice people, but there’s simply no reason for so much patent litigation to go through there. We might as well have patent litigation go through Bangor, Maine, where I went to high school. The town is about the same size, but it has better food and it’s near the coast. Bangor also has a modern airport and a life-size statue of Paul Bunyan.

Seriously, it’s obvious that something is wrong here, even if you don’t know the details. Patent trolls wouldn’t be flocking to a small town with no airport unless they had good reason.

And they do have good reason.

Levy is right to single out or point out Mr. Gilstrap for reasons that we covered here before. In another new article, this one from Patently-O, they alluded to the VENUE Act [1, 2] by suggesting change to patent venue and naming the VENUE Act explicitly:

Earlier this year, we presented some initial results of our study of what might happen if patent venue reform took place. Since then, Senator Flake (R-Az) introduced the VENUE Act of 2016, and last month, petitioners, led by a group including James Dabney and John Duffy, filed a petition for writ of certiori in the TC Heartland case in the Supreme Court. Amicus briefs are due October 17, 2016 and Kraft’s brief is due on November 16, 2016.

To support these deliberations, we examined the history of the patent venue law and presented some statistics about plaintiff venue preferences for the Eastern District (for even more statistics on this point see the new paper by Brian Love and James Yoon). Additionally, we empirically modeled both reforms by randomly selecting 939 cases from 2015, and making our best guess as to where cases would have been filed under the proposed rules, assuming they would have been filed at all. Since 2015, the overall number of patent cases has declined, about 20% YTD based on data from Lex Machina (4,216 cases by this time last year vs. 3,369 today). The Eastern District of Texas has made a number of changes and its share is also down from 44% in 2015, to 35% 2016 YTD (30% in 1Q, 36% in 2Q, and 38% in 3Q); the next closest district (Delaware) has seen about 9% of filings, based on data from Lex Machina.

After the FTC study that we shall mention separately it seems more likely that the VENUE Act will become a reality, or folded into an existing/prospective patent reform bill.

Speaking of patent trolls, even universities are feeding them now. Here is MIP sort of supporting the practice, as if weaponising universities that are funded by the public and turn into trolls that tax the same public is a good thing. No wonder MIP did this, with firms like McKool Smith as ‘company’; To quote: “The increase in university patent lawsuits in recent years and strategies for winning cases were among the issues discussed by presenters in the webcast “University Patent Licensing and Enforcement”, hosted by Managing IP in association with McKool Smith on September 26.”

These are euphemisms for what often boils down to trolling, if not direct then indirect, e.g. by passing patents to trolls like Intellectual Ventures — now at the epicentre of the collapse of software patents in the United States (more on that in an imminent long post as well).

If the VENUE Act passes, or even gets incorporated into a future patent reform bill, then Texas can say goodbye to a lot of its parasitic business. █

From World’s Best to World’s Worst: China’s SIPO (Worst of Asia) and France (Worst of Europe) the Vision for EPO

Posted in Asia, Europe, Patents at 5:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Poor quality patents (SIPO) and lack of examination (INPI)

SIPO and Battistelli

Summary: The trajectory of the EPO under Battistelli’s leadership gives cause for very serious concerns, which include patent trolling and a humongous disservice to existing grantees of EPs (European Patents)

THE EPO may be going down the road of both China's SIPO and France's INPI (where Battistelli and many of his cronies at today's EPO top-level management came from). The Chinese have remarkably low patent quality (quantity over quality is the mantra) and the French, who fail to attract applications (French is spoken by far fewer people than Mandarin speakers), hardly care about quality at all. A French INPI clerk just rubberstamps (or simply files/shelves) everything that comes in. If the EPO follows the French model, then no examiners will be needed, just clerks who can follow a simple manual. How would one feel about one’s old/er EP/s if every crappy application on the EPO’s pile was suddenly granted or at least given hasty consideration for the sake of so-called ‘production’? Battistelli’s policy poisons the well or muddies the water right now. It is unfair to people who spent a fortune (and many years) pursuing EPs.

“If the EPO follows the French model, then no examiners will be needed, just clerks who can follow a simple manual.”As we noted here several weeks ago, east Asia is becoming attractive to patent trolls [1, 2], due in part to low patent quality (same as was the case in the US). There are more trolls and litigation, not just poor patent quality; there’s a correlation between those two things. SIPO is by far the worst in that regard. Korea and Japan, in the mean time, recognise the self-destructive nature of M.A.D. with patents, based on another article from IAM that says: “This blog has noted that one of the big themes in Asia’s automaking industry this year has been a significant move by Japanese and Korean brands to join defensive patent alliances. It’s a strategic shift for the industry that in many ways is being led by companies in this part of the world, rather than their North American and European counterparts. But Chinese companies have not yet followed the same path in significant numbers, and industry observers say with litigation on the rise there, buy-in from players in China will be crucial for these alliances going forward.”

One or two of IAM’s paid (partly by patent trolls) writers have focused a lot on Asia recently. See the latest issue’s “Patents in Asia 2016″ series, including focus on China, Japan, South Korea, and Malaysia. The feature item was actually about China, titled “Putting China’s patent rise into context” (all behind a paywall) and Jacob later wrote (partly in relation to this) that China welcomes crappy patent applications from the US, just like the EPO under Battistelli does. He recently started following me in Twitter (maybe out of curiosity, I find him a lot more balanced than Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Wild) and he didn’t put it in these words but instead he wrote:

It was eye-opening, but not necessarily shocking, to read on this blog last Tuesday the suggestion that Huawei’s mobile patents might generate up to 20% of all the patent income earned by Chinese companies. The conjecture appeared in a new research paper which seeks to revise (downward) earlier estimates of the total royalty stack on the typical mobile phone. The study looked at 49 major mobile licensors, of which Huawei was one of only two Asian operating companies (the other being Samsung Electronics).

Credit the Shenzhen-based company for building an IP team that has put it head and shoulders above its domestic competitors in terms of patent portfolio strength. I was reminded, though, of a quote by Huawei head of IP Jason Ding that appears in the issue of IAM out this week…

There is also an article about Foxconn.

Asian companies haven’t much to gain from a crappy patent system. Take Samsung for example. The most stupid patent that has made headlines in recent years (slide-to-unlock, hardly a novel concept at all) might soon cost Samsung more than $0.1 billion, based on reports like this new one and some remarks from Florian Müller (he wrote a lot more about it in Twitter). To quote Bloomberg (cited by Slashdot):

Apple Inc. won an appeals court ruling that reinstates a patent-infringement verdict it won against Samsung Electronics Co., including for its slide-to-unlock feature for smartphones and tablets.

In an 8-3 ruling, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit said a three-judge panel was wrong to throw out the $119.6 million verdict in February. Instead, it ordered the trial judge to consider whether the judgment should be increased based on any intentional infringement by Samsung.

Does this not demonstrate how foolish software patents harm companies like Samsung, whose home country (Korea) does not permit software patenting (we wrote about this earlier in the month)? This new IAM article remarks on patent tax when it comes to phones, which makes them very expensive (“licensing return from mobile market at $14.3 billion”).

As for the patent system in France, where does one even begin? The patent system in France is worse than a bloody joke; one might even call it a facility for corruption in light of details about the Patent Boxes (we wrote about this too, several times in the recent past alone). Here is a new article about it, demonstrating that journalists have begun catching up with the dirty scheme:

France’s patent box legislation, which permits a 15 percent corporate tax rate for profits from licensing of intellectual property rights rather than the usual 35 percent corporate tax rate, is being challenged as unfair to the European Union single market.

The matter has come before the EU Code of Conduct Group for Business Taxation, where several EU countries—including Ireland, Bulgaria and the Baltic nations— are insisting the French patent box regime should be considered harmful.

Among those contesting France’s IP rate are EU member countries that were themselves previously criticized by France over their overall low corporate tax rates.

“The issue has surfaced because France insists its regime doesn’t need to be reformed as all EU member states agreed to do in 2014,” a European Union diplomat, who participates in the Code of Conduct Group of Business Taxation, told Bloomberg BNA Sept. 30.

“However, all other EU countries are reforming their tax regime and insist France must do the same. Some of these countries, many of them resentful over French criticism of tax dumping, are rejecting the French arguments against reform.”

In this new IAM article a connection between the French and the Chinese is highlighted, in the form of “France Brevets”:

Unlike IP Bridge and Intellectual Discovery, France Brevets did not provide comment for the feature, but anecdotal accounts suggest that there has been something of a shift in strategic focus at the firm in recent months – and the call for change has come from the highest levels.

It appears that securing a return on its 100% public sector investment is now the fund’s primary objective, with its aims of boosting the domestic SME sector and kickstarting a local market in IP assets taking a back seat, at least for the time being. Simultaneously, some key personnel have come and gone; in June, founding CEO Jean-Charles Hourcade was replaced by Didier Patry, who was previously head of IP at Eaton Aerospace and before that led Hewlett-Packard’s IP transactions department from 2002 to 2014. Pascal Asselot, who had served as the fund’s director of development and licensing since its establishment, departed in the same month.

The USPTO, which finally tightens patent scope and goes after trolls (more on that in articles tonight and tomorrow), isn’t the world’s worst; some of the worst are probably SIPO and INPI and this is what the EPO is connecting to (several days ago Battistelli bragged about meeting SIPO officials in the town where he used to be a mayor, over in France that's not even an EPO host nation). █

Has IP Kat’s Unofficial (Self-)Censorship Policy Expanded From Protecting the EPO’s Image to Protecting the UPC?

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:41 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

IP Kat gags

Summary: Suspicions that the popular blog IP Kat is suppressing criticism of the UPC are being aired, belatedly, over at IP Kat, hinting at the possibility of self-censorship due to financial motivations rather than fear of the EPO’s legal bullying, or strategic lawsuit against public participation (SLAPP)

THE EPO, as we last noted this afternoon, is trying to control not only media companies but also blogs, staff, and any other means of communication. The Office wants media blackout and information lockdown. Nobody but the chronic liar (Battistelli or cronies like Margot Fröhlinger) is allowed to have a voice. AMBA, for example, is too afraid/reluctant to even respond to E-mails from Managing IP. This is basically the current strategy of the EPO and in a sense it’s both clever and effective. That’s why North Korea and Iran adopted it.

Remember the times when IP Kat was a go-to place and a critical voice regarding the EPO? That was quite a while back. They write nothing about the subject anymore, so I asked them about it online. I am still waiting for an answer.

Several interesting (but old) comments were published at IP Kat shortly after we had noted something about IP Kat not publishing particular comments (we wrote about it in the afternoon), though the timing is quite possibly a coincidence, so we’re not suggesting that they did this in response to something we had written.

Here is what one comment asked: “Dear team of IPkat, I haven’t seen a post about the situation at the EPO since a couple of months. How come? Do you think there are no news? Have you been threatened? 3 staff rep in The Hague are being under investigation at the moment. Staff is planning demo next week. How come you do not report about it?”

No response since. I too asked them and have not received a response. “Has IP Kat been threatened — not just censored — by the EPO,” I asked IP Kat and its founder. “Given the circumstances, no reply might be “yes”,” I added.

Remember that IP Kat already received threats from other such bodies, as did a few other bloggers (not even big publishers and paid journalists).

Nowadays it feels like IP Kat writers, not wanting to have particular things mentioned, simply suppress particular things (censorship and also self-censorship). Some believe it’s done for fear that the EPO would censor them again (or maybe even send threatening letters as they did to me). Some bloggers did humorously insinuate that IP Kat was next on the EPO’s naughty list. First they were added to the censorship list (after they had done this to me), so is a threat of lawsuit next in line? Just the thought itself would be enough to gag (self-censor) IP Kat. It’s known as the Chilling Effect and next week — not fearing retaliation — we shall write about the chinchilla effect.

Here is a comment about alleged criminals at the top of the EPO. The EPO simply chooses call those who mention charges against them “defamation”. Here is the comment which is days old and IP Kat has not published until a relatively short while ago (I see publication time through my RSS feeds):

To further reinforce the narrative about defamation, VP3 sued the member of the board of appeal for in a German court – you may have read the outcome above (28/09): it appears that the Procurator dismissed the case recently.

Actually it was VP4 who tried to file a lawsuit in Germany.

His litigation track record is not so hot.
In January 2015 he apparently lost a defamation lawsuit in his home country:

http://techrights.org/2015/03/18/full-judgment-against-topic/

Now it seems that the German Procurator didn’t even consider it worthwhile opening proceedings against the person accused of defamation.

But don’t worry he still enjoys the favour of the Lord Protector of Eponia.

“Well,” the person later added. “my last comment about VP4 seems to have been suppressed.”

This comment too was suppressed (no way it was detected/identified as spam), so it looks like IP Kat hoped nobody would notice what had happened. I was already told, since almost a year ago by multiple people, that IP Kat had been deleting (not publishing is the equivalent of that) their comments. They deleted mine too. See this example and also this one (later they blamed the latter on spam filtering, but the former they just simply deleted).

For IP Kat to suppress discussions about EPO’s scandals is a lot easier these days; now the blog just no longer writes anything on the topic (hence every comment would be off topic); the only comments about it (if published at all) are clustered in some very distant page from 4 months ago. “I think it is still possible to post,” one person wrote, but there’s no guarantee that what gets posted will in fact be published. Well, maybe it depends on what it’s about. Selective publication of comments is a form of censorship, by definition (I have been reading and writing about the subject of censorship for several years, so I am very familiar with the methods).

One person asked “Has the thread reached its limit” and “It seems so” was the response, until IP Kat suddenly published half a dozen comments in this thread alone (in the mean time it did publish numerous other comments, every day in fact, so being absent from moderation is not a valid excuse).

Please note, based on the above, that there are no offensive words in there or anything that should invoke a spam filter (potential excuse in these cases). There are no clickable links, either.

Another new comment, this one regarding the UPC which the blog habitually promotes/markets, says the site “seems to be so highly unwilling to put information like this in the public domain” because it’s against the UPC. The thread touches on (promotes) the UPC, so the comment is relevant, it’s definitely on topic, and it refutes the original propaganda from the Bristows employee by stating:

This is my second attempt to get this comment posted, after the first one made on 10/06/16 at around 11:30 a.m. CEST still remains to be published, despite its receipt having been confirmed.

To the commentators on 10/04/16, 21:13 and on 10/05/16, 8:30:

Don´t forget to mention Mr Haft who is also a member of said committee of the German Bar Association. His firm Hoyng ROKH Monegier was created just recently by a Dutch and a German firm joining forces in joyful anticipation of the UPC. Should the UPC now not become a reality, this may well consitute a delicate situation for them… It is vested interests like these that bring about desperate suggestions such as going ahead with the UPC at any cost and even without a crucial participant like the UK.

It is left to the imagination of the readers why the IPKat (and more specifically the author of this post) seems to be so highly unwilling to put information like this in the public domain, apparently going so far as to even censor respective comments.

These conflicts of interest in the collusion behind UPC 'experts' were previously noted in relation to Tilmann, whom we mentioned here before in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]. This seems to suggest that the IP Kat blog not only censors criticism of the EPO but not also expands its suppression of comments to the UPC (although evidence is too scarce at this stage).

If IP Kat deleted (or did not publish) your comment/s, please get in touch with us so that we’ll know how broad the problem has become. If we are seeing selective coverage of particular sides depending on one’s agenda/goals/objectives/profit motive, then it is more severe than censorship and self-censorship for fear of SLAPP from the EPO.

For the record, Techrights accepted each and every one of the 33,583 comments posted over the years (zero censorship), including extremely rude and racist comments. That is what free speech means. █

The UPC is Dead, Says Opinion Partly Funded by Team UPC, But Patent Scope in Europe Remains an Issue

Posted in Europe, Patents at 9:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

UPC, RIP

Summary: The endless lobbying and selfish aspirations of Team UPC are going nowhere but the grave, albeit the scope of patents at the EPO (related to litigiousness and spurious/frivolous lawsuits) is still a cause for concern, especially now that Battistelli turns the EPO into another SIPO or INPI (rubberstamping operation with no effective controls)

THE UPC is in complete and utter disarray. We hardly ever hear about the UPC anymore, especially since the (in)famous speech of the British Prime Minister. A few days ago we saw Bristows LLP/UPC, a key British component of Team UPC, saying that Richard Gordon’s opinion “provides limited comfort” (this was also mentioned in IP Kat, where a lot of the UPC boosters hang out these days)

“We hardly ever hear about the UPC anymore, especially since the (in)famous speech of the British Prime Minister.”Who is this of “limited comfort” to? Team UPC, surely. The back room schemers and liars don’t want to accept that the UPC is dead, if not only in the UK then in Europe as a whole. As Bristows reveals, it actually sponsored this ‘opinion’, so it’s about as legitimate as those 'studies' Battistelli will present this coming week. To quote Bristows (emphasis ours): “The opinion of Richard Gordon QC and Tom Pascoe (here) has been widely reported as providing reassurance that there are no legal difficulties in the way of the UK participating in the UPC post-Brexit. As one of the sponsors of the opinion, Bristows does not share this viewpoint. The opinion merely reaches its conclusions “on balance” and other views remain perfectly credible. Moreover, it is a purely legal analysis and does not, of course, comment upon the political realities of the requirements it sets forth. The opinion makes it very clear that several boxes would have to be ticked in order to maximise the chances of the CJEU deeming the system legal, which are more or less inconceivable in the present political climate, especially following the Prime Minister’s speech at the recent Conservative Party conference. At least in the short term there is virtually zero chance of the UK ratifying the UPC Agreement, and the real question arising is: what are the longer term prospects for salvaging the UPC project – with UK participation?”

“Bristows is also, unsurprisingly, lobbying for software patents and all things that patent trolls love. It’s all about patent and litigation scope. For them, the more the merrier.”Nothing. Forget about it. Deal with the fact that you advertised fake jobs that did not exist and probably will never exist. That’s how unethical the people of Bristows have become and this is why we don’t merely single them out; we just know who the enemy of a sane patent system is. Bristows just wants lots of lots of litigation; that’s what Bristows profits from. Don’t let them get their way as any litigation comes at the rather great expense of people who actually produce things or buy things. Bristows is also, unsurprisingly, lobbying for software patents and all things that patent trolls love. It’s all about patent and litigation scope. For them, the more the merrier.

In other news, patents on genetics have taken a massive blow because according to this new report:

The 9-month-old patent battle over CRISPR, a novel genome-editing tool that could have immense commercial value, has taken two surprising twists.

[...]

In last week’s filing, attorneys for the Broad Institute asked patent officials to remove two of its issued patents that focus on saCas9 from the original case, as well as two other patents (and a few affiliated claims in other patents) that describe techniques for enabling the CRISPR-Cas9 construct to target the nucleus of a eukaryotic cell.

Patents on life, along with patents on algorithms, are extremely controversial. For good reasons, too. Both appear to be on their decline/demise in the US right now (if not globally). Companies know this. Recall Mayo.

“Patents on life, along with patents on algorithms, are extremely controversial. For good reasons, too.”Meanwhile, regarding the EPO Hepatitis C patent/s which we mentioned here the other day (expectation of decision noted a week earlier), there are more articles about the subject [1, 2, 3, 4] and to quote one of them: “Following the development from the EPO, MdM already claims that “the EPO’s decision means that sofosbuvir in itself is not protected by a patent any more.” However, Gilead was quick to refute the claim. STAT news quotes a Gilead spokesman’s statement which maintained the patent.”

There are various groups that combat patent maximalism in medicine. One of them the opportunists in the EPO now try to associate with for cheap PR stunts. “To support #MedsPaL,” the EPO wrote, “we are working in close collaboration with @inapichile, @EPOorg & @OnapiRD.”

Fro those who don’t know what MedsPaL is, see this new article from IP Watch. To quote:

A new database was launched this week to facilitate navigation through the patent field and increase transparency surrounding the patent status of medicines and licences.

The Medicines Patent Pool (MPP), Chile’s National Institute of Industrial Property (INAPI), and global health initiative UNITAID held a side event at the WIPO General Assemblies on 5 October. The event was held to present “MedsPaL”, the MPP’s Medicines Patent and Licenses Database, discuss the difficulties in navigating the patent field, and report on the activities by regional and national patent offices, which could inform and build on the new database.

Why would MedsPaL wish to be associated in any way with the EPO, where abuses against people are so frequent and cancer patients are shamefully disliked? And speaking of association issues, Research and Markets seems to have taken an interest in the EPO [1, 2] and it plans to give seminars in London next month. To quote a portion from one of those two new press releases:

The problem/solution’ approach is not officially part of the EPC, but is a criterion which has been developed by case law. It is now is hard to find a decision of the Boards of Appeal which do not rely on the problem/solution approach in order to decide upon inventive step. It looks easy, but when applied, it should be applied correctly. This is not just a formal matter, but a substantial issue of first importance.

One thing that Research and Markets overlooks is that today’s EPO violates the EPC on a regular basis, e.g. [1, 2]. It also attacks the Boards of Appeal (see, e.g., [1, 2, 3, 4]), the body/apparatus that’s supposed to ensure high patent quality at the EPO and can no longer properly do its job because of understaffing, lack of independence etc. — especially now that Battistelli puts a mortal end to patent quality at the Office (necessitating these boards the most). █

The Administrative Council Seems to Have No Issues With Battistelli Wasting Millions of Euros Buying the Media and Fake ‘Studies’

Posted in Deception, Europe, Patents at 8:59 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

…Not to mention lies about performance [1, 2]

Battistelli liar
Source (original): Rospatent

Summary: Battistelli’s house of cards, or the empire/castle of lies, continues to build up ahead of the upcoming “Social Conference”, which is little more than a union-busting enabler and tranquiliser for the delegates of the Administrative Council

Jesper Kongstad, the Chairman of the Administrative Council (AC), could save staff representatives at the EPO but chose not to. It’s part of a pattern of indifference from the Administrative Council towards EPO staff and protectionism for Team Battistelli. One begins to wonder if the Administrative Council has been so thoroughly infiltrated or incentivised to basically stop doing its job and practically become just an extension — not a supervisor — of the Office.

A couple of days ago, writing in the IP Kat blog that no longer covers EPO scandals, one comment said: “It doesn’t seem to be possible to post further comments. Has the thread reached its limit ?”

No comment since. We don’t know why (maybe a manual ending to a discussion).

“One begins to wonder if the Administrative Council has been so thoroughly infiltrated or incentivised to basically stop doing its job and practically become just an extension — not a supervisor — of the Office.”EPO staff has been losing its voice since the EPO bullied some publications like ours (including the infamous ban on IP Kat) and paid a lot of money to control the rest. The EPO did all this whilst attacking the EPO unions, which also constitute the staff’s voice. The European Patent Office, which is unaccountable, is now a totally rogue institution without effective controls (either inside or outside). It’s even worse than WIPO, where Gurry just got away with everything (stories about this subject can be found in our daily links since Friday). Based on this tweet, Battistelli’s lobbying event (charade) that costs millions of Euros will carry on. Who’s to say no? Who can even say no? Now that Battistelli is wasting millions of Euros on bogus ‘studies’ will the Administrative Council hold him accountable? Will anyone ever treat Battistelli as anything other than some kind of monarch? The EPC that establishes the status quo was supposed to ensure this would not happen, but right now the EPO is pretending to care for the EPC — all this while it violates the EPC on a regular basis, e.g. [1, 2].

“EPO staff has been losing its voice since the EPO bullied some publications like ours (including the infamous ban on IP Kat) and paid a lot of money to control the rest.”Next week there is a major propaganda campaign from Battistelli. The target audience is the Administrative Council and Battistelli’s lapdog (or pet chinchilla), Jesper Kongstad. We don’t expect too see any dissent in the campaign’s event because staff representatives have already been intentionally blocked from entering (we wrote a couple of articles about this before). The Local Staff Committee at The Hague met about a week ago and plans to demonstrate in a few days. "Social Conference" nonsense from Battistelli surely and understandably irritates those whom it will lie about (in their absence).

“Meanwhile,” one person wrote, “the President is trying to sew together fig leaves, and has called for a “Social Conference”. [...] The SUEPO Committee hopes and counts on staff to provide a clear and solid mandate – one that can be reasonably expected to terminate the abuses of the present management and restore (inter alia) the union rights at the EPO.”

“”Social Conference” nonsense from Battistelli surely and understandably irritates those whom it will lie about (in their absence).”Protests in Munich will start in just two days. We reckon that a lot of it will fall on Jesper Kongstad’s deaf ears, but hopefully politicians and the media will continue to press for justice. The EPO is spending over a million Euros per year controlling the media through FTI Consulting and additional money is spent paying the media directly for puff pieces, so the latter (media) might have priorities other than to cover protests. Media blackout won’t affect Techrights and in fact I took two day off work next week, to enable me to cover what goes on in Munich and The Hague (please get in touch with us regarding any updates before, throughout, and after). █

Addendum II: FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS – Further Information and a Mystery

Posted in Europe, Intellectual Monopoly at 7:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: A closer look at the “FJORDBLINK” trademark and what happened to the entity which registered it in Denmark (where the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation is still in charge)

IN OUR fourth part of the series we wrote about a company connected to the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation (EPO), but there’s a side story that merits a mention at least in the addenda.

We managed to find a copy of a product brochure for the birth pool marketed by FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS [PDF]. The product brochure is dated May 2015.

“According to official CVR records this company ceased trading on 10 October 2013. It is unclear what has exactly has happened to the “FJORDBLINK” trademark registered by FJORDBLINK MEDICAL P/S or who, if anybody, is the current assignee.”There is a small mystery here that we have been unable to solve so far. The brochure refers to the name “FJORDBLINK” as a registered trademark. According to our research, the trademark is indeed registered both in Denmark and also as a European trademark [PDF] with the EUIPO in Alicante [PDF]. In Denmark it is registered under the number VR 2011 02145.

As a European trademark it is registered under the EU Trademark number 011266764. However, as we noted in a previous article the trademark was not registered by FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS (CVR number 25942507) but by another entity with a confusingly similar name: FJORDBLINK MEDICAL P/S (CVR number 33392737).

The CVR number 33392737 leads to a defunct limited partnership company by the name of FOME P/S with an address at Vibelandsvej 8, Valby, 3200 Helsinge. Between 31 December 2010 and 11 April 2013 the company operated under the name FJORDBLINK MEDICAL P/S and its registered address was in Randers where Helle Jahn Jørgensen resides.

According to official CVR records this company ceased trading on 10 October 2013. It is unclear what has exactly has happened to the “FJORDBLINK” trademark registered by FJORDBLINK MEDICAL P/S or who, if anybody, is the current assignee.

If anyone wishes to help us find out, please get in contact. █

Addendum I: FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS Technically Housed in Jesper Kongstad’s New Mansion?

Posted in Europe, Patents at 7:18 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Some more views of the Bremelandsgård farmstead, courtesy of Google Maps, demonstrating overlap between FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS and Jesper Kongstad’s residence

IN OUR previous post we wrote about a company connected to the Chairman of the Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation (EPO) and explained why it’s of interest to us. This post contains additional information and observations including images.

If one types in the following company names into the search facility on Google Maps it recognises them and locates the company at the Bremelandsgård farmstead:

  1. Bremelandsgård v/Jesper Kongstad (the fur farming sole proprietorship) — to be covered in part 5 of our series
  2. FJORDBLINK MEDICAL ApS (the medical device company)

Google Maps was used to generate the following views of the farmstead, some with company tags (automatically provided by Google Maps) and some without.

Bremelandsgård

Bremelandsgård

Bremelandsgård

Bremelandsgård

Bremelandsgård

Part 5 will focus an another controversial aspect of the above farmhouse/mansion. It’s probably a lot more than just a house for ordinary people, akin to the mansion of Kim Dotcom in New Zealand. █

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