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Posted in News Roundup at 8:27 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
It can be intimidating to switch over to a new operating system, especially if you’ve been using Windows or macOS for years. The language in new systems can be totally different from what you’re used to, and Linux may seem particularly complicated to newcomers.
Luckily, Linux has evolved massively over the past few years, and it’s now easier than ever to install and use this open-source operating system. In some cases, you won’t even need to use the terminal window to do it!
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It’s a common myth that Linux doesn’t support computer hardware like printers, speakers, scanners, keyboards, and other appliances. However, you’ll find that this isn’t the case, as it supports a vast range of hardware.
You can simply search your device’s name alongside ‘Linux’ as a keyword to find answers should you have any trouble getting hardware working. Linux forums on Reddit and Stack Overflow could also provide you with the guidance you need. But in most cases, your hardware will work just fine.
My main file manager is LF and most of the file managers I look at are of the same style but today is different, today we’re looking at XPLR which is a single pane file manager with extra sub windows that can be 100% customized in Lua.
**gcc-go** and **gcc-java** from the **d** software series of Slackware.
Emacs has a really neat mode built into it called prettify-symbols-mode. You add a block of code into your Emacs config listing words and corresponding symbols. Anytime you type one of the words, Emacs replaces with the symbol or emoji that you specify.
Back in April the out-of-tree Reiser4 file-system was updated for Linux 5.12 compatibility while now with Linux 5.13 being right around the corner, Edward Shishkin has updated the experimental Reiser5 file-system code for v5.12 compatibility.
Reiser5 continues to be developed by Shishkin as a next-generation successor to Reiser4 with various new features around its logical volume, multi-device, selective file migration, and other features.
Linus Torvalds is celebrating Father’s Day by releasing Linux 5.13-rc7. Kernel maintainers and testers managed to keep him happy the father of Linux happy this week by keeping to a small change set for this late-stage release candidate.
The 5.13-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. “So there’s not a huge number of patches in here, and most of the patches are pretty small too. A fair number of one-liners and ‘few-liners’. Which is just how I like it.”
Published all the way back in September 2019 was a Linux driver for supporting the Pass-Through DMA controller for EPYC processors. The PTDMA hardware allows for high bandwidth memory-to-memory and I/O copy operations. Now mid-way through 2021 that AMD PTDMA Linux driver remains in the works and is up to its tenth driver revision while waiting to see if it’s now ready for mainline or further changes are still deemed necessary.
This AMD PTDMA controller and driver is optimized for use with AMD Non-Transparent Bridge (NTB) devices and not general purpose DMA. NTB is used for in connecting multiple separate memory systems to the same PCI Express fabric. The PTDMA driver supports the 0×1498 (PCI device ID) controller found within EPYC processors since 7002 “Rome”.
Although Linux distros aren’t exactly considered the most user-friendly operating systems available, many of the different distributions do include some very helpful utilities – as long as you know where to look. Not only can some of these utilities be used for managing and maintaining your Linux data, but some of them are specifically meant for data recovery or backup.
It’s important to note that all Linux distros are not equal. As such, some of these tools might not be included with your Linux installation by default. Many of them are featured in some of the most popular distros, however, including ALT Linux, Debian, Fedora, Red Hat, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Ubuntu, and more.
QOwnNotes is a open source (GPL) plain-text file notepad with markdown support and todo list manager for GNU/Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, that (optionally) works together with the notes application of ownCloud (or Nextcloud). So you are able to write down your thoughts with QOwnNotes and edit or search for them later from your mobile device (like with CloudNotes) or the ownCloud web-service. The notes are stored as plain text files and you can sync them with your ownCloud sync client. Of course other software, like Dropbox, Syncthing, Seafile or BitTorrent Sync can be used too.
The Raspberry Pi 4 is seriously impressive, with some considerable hardware improvements over the Pi 3. As a result, many are picking it up to use as a Linux computer. One of the best operating systems to run on the Pi 4 is Rasberry Pi OS. Here’s how to get it set up.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Froxlor on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, Froxlor is an open-source lightweight server management control panel to effectively manage web hosting, domain names, FTP accounts, email accounts, support tickets, and customers that are associated with them and are licensed under GPL.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you the step-by-step installation of the Froxlor server management panel on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.
This simple tutorial shows how to enable & configure the multi-touch gestures in Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 21.04, Ubuntu 21.10 using touchegg.
For those running Ubuntu on laptop or PC with external touchpad, multi-finger gestures enable users with more actions to control your system.
Since Ubuntu does not offer a utility to configure multi-touch functions, touchegg is a free open-source tool to enable this feature for you. And it supports for both global gestures or gestures for Firefox, Chromium, Google Chrome only.
In this tutorial we’ll learn how to get Public IP address from Terminal or Command Line.
This will be useful to find public IP address of a cloud instance like EC2 instance, Lightsail instance, or DigitalOcean Droplets.
We can also use this method to find Public IP of a VPS or any bare metal server that have Public IP Address.
One of the other issues I see with the store and stores in general is that putting content on there means there’s yet another place where an author needs to manage comments. And that can be quite a deal breaker.
I spend some time on getting OPDS 1 implemented into KNewStuff, because it’s a really simple way of representing available content, and I am thinking that for comments I am going to let people link in an rss/atom feed with comments. All the major content management systems have the ability to generate feeds for the comments of a single article, so authors can just link the comment feed for a blogpost, and then on our end we should direct the user to go to the blog if they want to comment.
I think it would be pretty valuable if people could disable comments and instead point at the feed where they keep their comments. There’s some side effects there we need to keep track of, like making sure it’s clear these comments are on that blog and not on the store, as well as some vetting of the comment feed in general, but at the least it’d be in a place where the author can actually control.
This kinda ends up making commenting on the store somewhat pointless at first glance. We could try to see if some of the distributed/federated stuff is useful for assisting people to comment on the author’s comment-feed, but that’s also something that needs investigation.
Conclusion
I’ve been thinking about this all a lot of the past few years. On Saturday there was an Akademy talk by leinir about distributed app stores, and there’s going to be a birds-of-a-feather about that on Friday morning. I might not be available then, so I just wanted to get my thoughts about reviews and comments out there.
In general, I think my adjustments tend to come from a place where I have experience sitting in the author chair, as well as consuming a whole lot of indie stuff, and when looking at those, the approach of the big stores seems really weird.
Another week has just passed and I have new things to share. This week was more maintenance work and getting ready before we try to build digiKam with Qt6.
In the last week, I ported a lot of code to Qt 5.15, however we need to maintain compatibility with at least Qt 5.12 LTS. I wrote several pre-processor checks and macros to maintain the required compatibilty.
The Akademy conference weekend (schedule) is almost over already. I was unavoidably detained for saturday and haven’t been able to reserve much time for it this weekend or the rest of the week. On sunday morning I hopped off my bicycle 15 minutes before the start of the KDE e.V. board report, so I’ll let you know that I was wearing bike shorts while looking .. um .. boardly up top. Thanks Tomaz for noticing my long flowing blonde hair. Beside the KDE e.V. AGM and KDE e.V. board office hour I only have one thing going on, my only thing that isn’t administrative in nature: Qt6 on the BSDs; giving it some love and bringing the packaging up-to-date on FreeBSD (catching up with OpenBSD). That’s thursday at 1600 UTC (1800 CEST, so I’m skipping dinner for it). Join us for some ports hacking.
Today is Fete de la Musique in the French-speaking world.
It feels like the perfect time to release the video of former GNOME employee Magdalen Berns singing Zombie. I recorded this at the Google Mentor Summit in 2014. Magdalen is no longer with us, she died of cancer in 2019.
If Magdalen was alive today, would she recognize the GNOME organization? People are gradually coming to realize that the recent attacks on Dr Richard Stallman crossed far too many red lines. Working for a non-profit organization is a privilege and when certain GNOME employees attacked a volunteer, Dr Stallman, they undermined the principle of volunteering everywhere.
We already see people who signed the petition in the heat of the moment are asking to remove their names. The choice of the song’s title is subject to debate. Are zombies the people trying to stamp out independent thought from leaders like Dr Stallman? Or are they the volunteers silenced by mindless groupthink?
TrueNAS Core, formerly called FreeNAS, is a FreeBSD-based operating system which provides Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services. TrueNAS Core is the community branch of the TrueNAS project, sponsored by iXsystems. It also has a commercial branch called TrueNAS Enterprise. TrueNAS provides a minimal operating system base with a friendly, web-based front end for administration. Using TrueNAS we can set up ZFS storage pools, filesystem snapshots, network shares, user accounts, and background services through the web-based administration portal.
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On the whole, I like TrueNAS Core. It’s easy to set up, the web-based interface is easy to navigate. The system does a good job of displaying an overview of information and options in a friendly interface. There are a lot of options which might be overwhelming at first, but they’re generally organized in a way that allows us to find specific tools fairly quickly.
I was frustrated with the networking issues which prevented me from using plugins, but the tools which were available, such as those for setting up pools, automating filesystem snapshots, and working with services were all top notch. I’d definitely look at using TrueNAS in an organization that had a lot of data to manage and wanted to organize and share it quickly and with minimal fuss.
Windows 11 may be the name of the upcoming version of Microsoft’s desktop operating system, but that doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the number ten. For instance, one of the most popular Linux distributions, Debian, currently sits at version 10 (Code-named “Buster”).
Actually, taking the number ten even further, Debian 10.10 is now available for download. Yes, this is the tenth point release of the tenth version of the wildly popular operating system. Those that believe in numerology may see significance in this versioning. Current Debian users should update their packages immediately, as 10.10 is chock full of important bug fixes and security updates.
“The Debian project is pleased to announce the tenth update of its stable distribution Debian 10 (codename buster). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available,” says the development team.
Debian 10.10 is out as the latest routine point release, before the upcoming release of the Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
The Debian Project has announced the 10th update of its stable distribution. Like all other point releases that Debian project develops, Debian 10.10 has arrived for keep correcting errors from the Buster, that was released almost two years ago. In the next few weeks we should get a release date for Debian 11 “Bullseye”.
Over the past days, I have received tons of positive feedback on my previous blog post about forming the Debian BBB Packaging Team [1]. Feedback arrived via mail, IRC, [matrix] and Mastodon. Awesome. Thanks for sharing your thoughts, folks…
Some problems are just too big and complex for any one person who handles them alone, for these challenges we need to collaborate, but what that means?
The expanding global pharmaceutical and medical device markets, the ever-increasing expense of FDA approvals, and the convenience of working with local regulatory agencies often combine to induce drug and device makers to choose first-launch markets outside of the United States. Ordinarily, there is little concern for U.S. patent risk when the development work is conducted entirely outside of the United States. Despite Merck’s apparent framework for applying the patent safe harbor where some aspect of the foreign regulatory work touches the United States, the early cases discussed above have not been expressly overruled and require caution. In varying degrees, each of the early cases demanded some evidentiary linkage between the overseas activity and the pursuit of FDA approval. Amgen and Elan appear to reflect both settled law and the safest course of action—the parallel quest for FDA and overseas approvals.
Although Merck does not condition safe harbor protection on an active IND or IDE submission, the assumption underlying the decision is that the work must target actual drug development in the direction of FDA approval. See Merck, 545 U.S. at 207 (requiring “reasonable basis for believing that a patented compound may work, . . . to produce a particular physiological effect, and . . . if successful, would be appropriate to include in a submission to the FDA”). Drug makers with an established track record of developing drugs for both the U.S. and overseas markets, whether alone or through licensees, are likely best positioned to demonstrate that an overseas first launch does not preclude clinical and other experimental work that produces information appropriate for eventual FDA submission.
Priti Krishtel’s first case as a legal aid lawyer in India was as tragic as they come. One day in 2004, she recalls a couple walking into her office in Bengaluru with their three children. Unable to afford life-saving medicine to keep their HIV infections in check, the parents were dying of AIDS. With no other options, they wanted Krishtel to draw up guardianship transfer papers: The rambunctious siblings were to be sent to an orphanage before their parents died.
Even though drugs that could save the parents’ lives were available, the cost at the time was out of reach for the couple, who were living in poverty. Krishtel and the collective of lawyers she was working with at the time went on to handle many similar cases. By 2007, she came up with a strategy to slash the cost of HIV drugs in India: On behalf of patients’ rights groups, lawyers with the nonprofit Initiative for Medicines, Access, and Knowledge (I-MAK) she had cofounded would challenge specific patent applications on brand-name drugs, opening opportunities for generic manufacturers. Through a combination of patent expirations and legal challenges, price competition in India drove down the cost of the most common HIV therapy by more than 80% between 2003 and 2008.
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One patent application Krishtel and I-MAK challenged was held by Illinois-based Abbott Laboratories on a formulation of its HIV drug Aluvia that does not require refrigeration – crucial in hot climates like India. At the Indian patent office in Delhi, she argued that the technique used to make the drug heat stable was not new, Abbott had merely applied the technology to its own drug. Under Indian patent law, a drug cannot be re-patented unless it is also more effective than the existing patented form.
The office refused to grant a patent. Then Krishtel and her team scored two more victories. Patents on another adult HIV drug and on a liquid formulation for children were also refused, which enabled broad access to the drugs for millions of low-income Indians – and people around the world in subsequent years because they were supplied by Indian generic manufacturers at a fraction of the brand-name cost.
Linux turns 30 this summer and, as part of the celebrations, the Linux Foundation asked the open source community “How has Linux Impacted your Life?” Authors of 30 personal stories have each been able to name a penguin. This led us to ask, Why is the Linux mascot a penguin?
Back in April the Linux Foundation asked for submissions to what is now a slide show of stories about how Linux changed their lives. The responses came from all over the globe and 30 of them were selected to create a slideshow that you can view on the Linux Foundation blog. To thank the 30 respondents for their contributions, each of them was invited to name a penguin adopted from SANCCOB, the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds, a charity which rescues and rehabilitates seabirds that are injured or abandoned and then releases them back into the wild. This is why each of the slides features a penguin!
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But why was Torvalds so keen on penguins. He himself joked that he had contracted “penguinitis”, a disease that “makes you stay awake at nights just thinking about penguins and feeling great love towards them” after being bitten by a “ferocious” Fairy Penguin on his first trip to Austrailia in the early 1990s to talk to the Australian Unix Users Group.
There’s a host of issues with how Apple and Google abuse their mobile app distribution monopolies. The 30% “tax”–which actually peaks at 35.25% (plus Search Ads and developer fees)–gets most of the attention, but what those two companies are doing with respect to governmental contact-tracing apps is exacting an infinitely higher price in the form of human lives. Apple and Google are obstructing governmental efforts to combat COVID and have contributed to the rise of the Delta variant in the UK. That deadly and hypercontagious strain is now spreading to mainland Europe.
The Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, scientifically known as B.1.617.2, “has shown to be more contagious and more lethal both in South Asia and in the UK,” University of Chicago infectious disease expert Dr. Anu Hazra told CBS. In fact, studies have shown it to be about twice as infectious as the original Alpha variant, or “wild type.” Other viruses mutated into irrelevance: as they got more contagious, they also got less pernicious. SARS-CoV-2 might still do us that favor, but so far it hasn’t. It gets worse and worse.
Those who have been vaccinated only once enjoy very limited protection against severe symptoms if they contract the Delta variant. In a few months from now, colder temperatures will exacerbate the situation. The threat of a major pan-European Delta wave–which has already occurred in India and in the UK–is real.
Apple and Google would not have to “do” anything. They’d just have to be more reasonable and allow governments to do their job. I know it sounds absurd that companies should allow governments something–not the other way round–but unfortunately it’s an accurate portrayal of the situation: in April, Apple and Google rejected an update to the official contact-tracing app for England & Wales that would have made the app more effective.
1 score and a little over 2 years ago, IRC was created by the great and honorable Jarkko Oikarinen. It’s had its ups and downs, from the era of net splits to the era of cancel culture. However, we’re proud to announce that we’ve completely obliterated the swamp removing the shackles on progress, and now we’re sailing blue seas. YaRR!
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The app is in beta, but everything works. If you find any bugs, please let us know in #freenode-bnc!
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Now that IRC is up to speed with modern messaging clients, we’re now aiming to take things further yet. IRC is a much more robust and useable messaging platform than anything else out there. We’re just getting started.
Special thanks goes out to tjr and his team, as well as the entire freenode staff as we worked through the transition from legacy to present. An additional special thanks goes out to prawnsalad, who’s previous contributions to the FOSS and IRC community, including the Kiwi IRC suite of FOSS, made all of this possible.
The power of the people cannot be stopped. freenode is here to stay, no matter what gets thrown at it. It’s now, as well, a recognized digital autonomous zone which gives it the unique ability to provide what freenode does best: freedom.
freenode is IRC. freenode is FOSS. freenode is freedom. Ask not what you can do for freenode, but what freenode will do for you. IRC is back!
With apologies to Shakespeare, here we discuss the difficult question of what information to include in your patent application, focussing on a decision concerning biological deposits – specifically a hybridoma. In this particular case the hybridoma did not serve as a claim limitation, thus the claimed invention (an antibody) was found to lack novelty.
Disclosure of your invention, particularly when it is complex and perhaps not fully understood/characterised can be difficult to appropriately balance when preparing your patent application. You don’t necessarily want to give away all your knowhow but nor do you want to fall into the insufficiency trap. For biotechnological inventions, such as a particular microbial strain or an antibody, where the invention may not have been completely structurally or genetically characterised, it may be possible to submit a biological deposit to allow patent disclosure requirements to be met. The deposit is usually taken as disclosing the invention in sufficient detail to allow the skilled person to make and use it.
However, a recently published European Patent Office (EPO) Board of Appeal decision, T 32/17, found a claim to a monoclonal antibody defined in part by a deposit invalid. In particular, the claim was to an antibody defined by two features – the ability to recognise a specific vitamin (i.e. a functional feature) and that the antibody in question was produced by one of a specific list of deposited hybridomas (i.e. a product by process feature).
According to the legislation, going forward exemption certificates for royalties will be issued even if it is unclear whether a tax liability exists. This new interpretation of the law should in particular be relevant to the so-called IP registration cases. According to a new interpretation of the German WHT laws, starting this year the German tax authorities hold nonresident licensees and licensors liable to withhold and remit taxes in Germany on extraterritorial royalty payments as long as the licensed intellectual property (IP) rights are registered with the German trademark and patent office. The new law will provide more legal certainty for these taxpayers.
With the development of techniques such as CRISPR and increasing knowledge in the ‘omics’, science can now provide what only a few years ago looked like science fiction: personalised medicine (sometimes referred to as ‘precision medicine’ or ‘personalised healthcare’). Personalised medicine is an evolving field where a therapeutic treatment is tailored to an individual with a particular disease and is capable not only of avoiding or minimising harmful side effects caused by mass medicines and treatments (as well as ensuring a more successful outcome), but also helping reduce costs compared with a trial-and-error approach to disease treatment.
This chapter aims to discuss the current status of personalised medicine in Brazil from both a regulatory and an IP standpoint, as well as to underline the main challenges in this area.
Late last month, Junior Party University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (hereinafter, “CVC”) and Senior Party The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (hereinafter, “Broad”) each filed Motions to Exclude Evidence in Interference No. 106,115. Now CVC has filed its Opposition to Broad’s motion to exclude and Broad has filed its responsive Reply.
Broad’s motion to exclude was specifically directed to testimony from Dr. Phillip Zamore regarding “how a person having ordinary skill in the art (“POSA”) allegedly would have understood (1) the March 2011 Deltcheva et al. reference’s disclosures regarding tracrRNA, (2) the RNAi, pre-mRNA, and DNA systems he alleges are relevant to Deltcheva et al.’s disclosures, and (3) Dr. Zhang’s October 24, 2011 email regarding the role of tracrRNA in the CRISPR-Cas9 cutting complex.” According to Broad, what Dr. Zamore’s declaration did not attest to was “(1) whether a 2012 POSA would have had a reasonable expectation of success of using CRISPR-Cas9 in eukaryotic cells; (2) the state of the art after the Jinek 2012 paper; or (3) relevant prokaryotic-based systems, such as Group II introns,” all of which were issues upon which CVC Priority Motion relied. But these issues were attested to not by Dr. Zamore in support of CVC’s priority claims but by another witness, who did not opine on them. Thus, CVC’s proffer of Dr. Zamore’s testimony on these matters was an attempt, in Broad’s view, to “untimely seek[] to obtain expert testimony on these topics via improper re-direct testimony by Dr. Zamore” (i.e., during Broad’s cross-examination of CVC’s witness). And Broad asserted that its cross-examination of Dr. Zamore was properly limited to “the actual opinions expressed in Dr. Zamore’s declaration and his qualifications,” and thus did not “open the door” to the testimony CVC elicited on redirect examination.
European Patent Office Decision T0032/17 has some interesting points to note on the disclosure of technical features conferred by hybridoma deposit information and the burden of proof in relation to product-by-process claims in opposition proceedings.
The claim defined the monoclonal antibody by a functional feature (the antigens the antibody is able to recognise) and a process feature (the antibody being “produced from a hybridoma (…)”). The question arose as to whether the process feature conferred any additional technical features on the claimed antibody. The Opposition Division held that, as a consequence of the process feature, the claimed antibodies were characterised by a unique amino acid sequence because “deposit numbers allow to identify specific hybridomas” and “each antibody produced by a different hybridoma will have a different sequence (heavy and light chains) which renders the antibody unique.”.
This afternoon, President Biden signed S. 475, the “Juneteenth National Independence Day Act,” into law. The Act designates Juneteenth National Independence Day as a Federal holiday.
In a memorandum issued by the U.S. Office of Personal Management shortly after the signing, the OPM noted that when a Federal holiday falls on a non-work day for a full-time Federal employee, an alternative or “in-lieu-of” holiday within the employee’s tour of duty is designated based on the rules in 5 U.S.C. § 6103(b) and Executive Order 11582. Because June 19th falls on a Saturday this year, the “in-lieu-of” holiday for Federal employees with a Monday-through-Friday work schedule will be Friday, June 18.
Rather, Judge Stark found that Cirba Inc. (“INC”) did not actually have rights to enforce the patent and thus dismissed the case for lack of Article III standing.
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Basically, the theme of INC’s case was about competition against the much larger VMWare, but IP is only a patent holder. Thus, all is not lost for Cirba, but juries are quite unpredictable.
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The new trial order is not a final judgment — the case is still ongoing. That means that there is no right to appeal the case immediately. However, Cirba has petitioned the Federal Circuit for writ of mandamus, arguing that the dismissal on standing was improper. The petition particularly focuses on the Supreme Court’s Lexmark decision and the Federal Circuit’s two subsequent decisions of Lone Star and Schwendimann. In particular, the plaintiff argues that under those decisions, the patent ownership is not a jurisdictional/standing question. “[D]ecisions treating the prerequisites of the Patent Act as jurisdictional were wrong.” Schwendimann. “Whether a party possesses all substantial rights in a patent does not implicate standing or subject-matter jurisdiction.” Lone Star.
European patents can be opposed by ‘any person’ within nine months of the publication of the mention of the grant of the European patent in the European Patent Bulletin. The phrase ‘any person’ includes anyone other than the patent proprietor themselves (G 3/93, G 3/97). Even a person listed as an inventor on a particular patent can oppose that patent (T 3/06).
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However, the EPO reaffirmed the principle of ‘any person’ oppositions, stating in the decision, among other things, that any person who starts opposition proceedings provides three main contributions to society at large:
(1) Undeserved monopolies may be revoked or limited to their due scope;
(2) industrial development is fostered in that the direction of innovation is not led astray by wrongfully granted monopolies; and
(3) legal certainty is enhanced.
Some counsel say selective FTO is key in a crowded field, while others say ignorance is bliss
Some counsel say selective FTO is key in a crowded field, while others say ignorance is bliss
Over the past decade, the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) of the EPO has changed its case law several times on the patentability of plants (and animals) produced by essentially biological processes according to Article 53(b) of the European Patent Convention (EPC). Rather than achieving the envisioned legal certainty, the decisions have created a gap in patent protection for biotechnological inventions owing to the different interpretations of the phrase ‘essentially biological process’ and the EPO’s more recent practice of forcing applicants to expressly disclaim plants obtained by such processes from claims directed at plants obtained by technical processes. While allowing the patentability of plants in principle, Article 53(b) was originally introduced to exclude plant varieties and essentially biological processes of plant breeding from patentability to avoid an overlap with the available national, regional and international protection of plant varieties. In this way, plant breeders would have the freedom to breed and cross in the traditional biological ways without needing to worry about patent protection.
However, looking at the wording of Article 53(b), for example, it is only plant varieties as such that are excluded. As soon as a plant with a trait or mutation is claimed, it is from that point not limited to a single plant variety and the invention becomes patentable. Similarly, a claim to a new and inventive allele, haplotype, mutated protein or DNA sequence remains patentable and will include in its scope plants incorporating material of this kind, even if produced by essentially biological processes. Therefore, despite Article 53(b)’s exclusion from patentability, plant breeders still face potential infringement of existing patent rights, as is the case with any innovative area of research and development. Plant breeders should, at least to a certain extent, be required to accept this if they want to participate in a new innovative area of research and development.
Boston area drug formulation development firm Integral BioSystems LLC has developed the platform technology NanoM™ for the formulation of new chemical entities as well as already-approved drugs in a 505(b)2 environment. The patented technology is a novel, differentiated and improved delivery approach for administering sustained-release medications, both small molecules and biologics to ocular and other tissue types, both as therapies adjunct to surgical interventions as well as stand-alone sustained release drug therapies in ophthalmology. The technology is also applicable to otology, intranasal, buccal, sublingual, urology and other accessible tissue spaces.
The European Patent Office (EPO) today honored two U.S. researchers with the European Inventor Award 2021. Indian-American chemist Sumita Mitra won the innovation prize in the “Non-EPO countries” category for her invention that successfully integrated nanotechnology into dental materials. Serbian-American biomedical engineer and university professor Gordana Vunjak-Novakovic won the Award’s Popular Prize, having received the most votes from the public in an online poll. Vunjak-Novakovic, who had been nominated in the “Lifetime achievement” category, opened new horizons in regenerative medicine by developing a way of growing new tissue ex vivo (outside the body) using the patient’s own cells.
Innovative Foundry Technologies LLC (IFT) has resolved its patent dispute with Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC). In addition, IFT has acquired new patents, one of which it asserted in a new infringement lawsuit filed in Germany. Specifically, on May 25, 2021, IFT filed two new infringement lawsuits in the Dusseldorf, Germany Patent Court, alleging that Micron Technologies, Inc., Micron Semiconductor (Deutschland) GmbH, and Mouser Electronics, Inc. infringe one of IFT’s patents, German Patent De 10 2008 030 854 B4, “MOS transistors having depressed drain and source regions and conforming metal silicide regions, and methods of fabricating the transistors.”
Late last month, Junior Party University of California/Berkeley, the University of Vienna, and Emmanuelle Charpentier (hereinafter, “CVC”) and Senior Party The Broad Institute, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Harvard University (hereinafter, “Broad”) each filed Motions to Exclude Evidence in Interference No. 106,115. Now Broad has filed its Opposition to CVC’s motion and CVC has filed its responsive Reply.
CVC’s motion was directed to testimonial declarations of several Broad witnesses, including Benjamin Davies, Mark Kay, Alan Lambowith, Paul Simons, Erez Lieberman Aidan, Greg Hannon, Mark Isalan, Caixao Gao, Adam Bogdanove, Thierry VandenDriessche, Bryan Cullen, Paula Cannon, and Ronald Breaker, as well as documentary evidence. CVC’s basis for its motion was that this witness testimony had not been subject to cross-examination, based on the Federal Rules of Evidence, Standing Order (SO) ¶ 157.3, 37 C.F.R. § 42.51(c), and precedent including Rose v. Frazer, Praxair Distrib., Inc. v. INO Therapeutics LLC, and Mexichem Amanco Holdings S.A. de C.V. v. Honeywell Int’l, Inc. CVC also asserted that certain testimony, particularly that of Dr. Breaker, was hearsay. CVC raised similar hearsay objections to Broad’s proffer of two books about CRISPR, by Walter Isaacson (The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race) and Kenneth (sic) Davies (Editing Humanity: The CRISPR Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing).
Inventive step and person skilled in the art
An essential requirement for patentability is an inventive step, which aims to ensure that a novel technical solution is patented only when it differs enough from the prior art (ie, previously known products and methods). The inventive step, according to European practice, is assessed by determining the difference between the invention in question and the prior art and evaluating the significance of the difference. In general, the difference is significant enough if it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art. In addition to the inventive step, the description of an invention provided in the patent application must provide enough details that would enable the skilled person to implement the invention on the basis of the application.
Therefore, the person skilled in the art is a key player when assessing both the inventive step and the sufficiency of the provided description for the invention. According to European practice, the ‘skilled person’ is, in simple terms, a fictional character who knows everything about the relevant area of technology but is not adept at applying their knowledge to find new ways of solving tasks. However, the person skilled in the art is capable of routine types of work and can carry out experiments.
What is changing in AI patenting practice?
In European patenting practice, European Patent Office (EPO) decisions play a significant role and set directions. Decision T 0161/18 by the Boards of Appeal (BoA) of the EPO stated that the skilled person would be unable to train a neural network that was needed for the solution described in a patent application since the content of the application was insufficient. The BoA considered that the skilled person would need more information than was disclosed in the application to train the neural network. The decision was unfavourable for the applicant as the application had been filed back in 2005 and the missing information could no longer be added.
The EPO’s longstanding practice for inventions has been to assess the inventive step of a presented solution by referring to what is “obvious to the person skilled in the art”. If the presented solution is obvious to the skilled person, this means, in practice, that the office considers that the skilled person would have the knowledge and skills to end up with a solution by following the invention described in the application. The EPO examination guidelines provide general guidance on the level of knowledge and skills of the skilled person but no detailed definition of the different fields of technology exists.
In March of this year, the Enlarged Board of Appeal reaffirmed the European Patent Office (EPO)’s approach to the patentability of computer-implemented simulations.1 While the EPO continues to follow a “technological contribution” approach to patentability, Canada has recently rejected a similar “problem-solution” approach in favour of an approach based on purposive construction of the claims. This article looks at both approaches and how they apply to computer-implemented inventions.
European Patent Office Approach
The EPO has a two-hurdle approach to patentability. Under Article 52(1) of the European Patent Convention, “patents shall be granted for any inventions, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application.” The first hurdle is patent eligibility, which is assessed without reference to the prior art. Article 52(2) EPC lists items that are not considered eligible inventions which includes, amongst other abstract ideas, programs for computers. However, for computer-implemented inventions this first hurdle has become relatively easy to clear, and can be satisfied by including the use of a computer in the claimed subject-matter. This was deemed the “any hardware” approach (T 0253/03) as a single technological feature is
In this article for The Patent Lawyer, Andrew White and Conor McGuinness develop key insights into patenting video games with exploration of unsuccessful and successful case examples.
US video game publisher Electronic Arts has recently announced its agreement to purchase UK-based video game publisher Codemasters for approximately $1.2 billion. This follows the recent acquisition of, for an undisclosed amount, Scottish video game developer Ruffian Games by another large US publisher, Rockstar Games. UK-based companies are therefore clearly playing a leading role in video game development and publication.
The UK consumer market is of similar scale; its gaming market is currently the sixth biggest globally with UK consumers spending an estimated £5.35 billion on game hardware and software.
【Volume 50】Great news to software developers! The new Taiwan Patent Examination Guidelines for Computer Software-Related Inventions (“New Guidelines”) will take effect on 1 July 2021. The New Guidelines issued by the Taiwan intellectual Property Office (TIPO) involve significant changes to the eligibility, clarity, novelty and non-obviousness of computer software-related inventions. References were made to the computer software examination guidelines of the Japan Patent Office (JPO), and multiple judgment examples made in Japan are also incorporated. The New Guidelines will provide both the applicant and examiner with a much clearer guidance to the requirements for computer software patents.
UKIPO warns that post-Brexit filing deadline looms – The UK Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) has posted a reminder that 30 September 2021 is the deadline for customers filing a UK right and claiming an earlier filing date for EU trademarks and design applications. Following the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union, customers with EU trademarks and design applications that were pending on 1 January 2021 could file for a UK right and claim the earlier filing date, but time is now running out to do so. The office is therefore encouraging rights holders to file such applications as soon as possible, noting: “An early application will help with early examination and allow time for refiling if necessary, as the deadline approaches”. (TL)
Counsel say vendors, direct contact with infringers and searching the inside of apps can help them with clearance and enforcement
The Federal Circuit has affirmed the TTAB’s decision refusing to register FocusVision’s eponymous mark FOCUSVISION after being opposed by IBI based upon its FOCUS marks. The appeal focused in part on the similarity of goods, trade channels, and sales.
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IBI’s lowest cost service is $30,000 for its “WebFocus” tool. A full “Focus” is significantly more expensive. FocusVision argued that the high price, major commitment associated with the purchase, and sophistication of the buyers all suggested against confusion. On appeal, the Federal Circuit noted that “even sophisticated purchasers may be confused by marks that are sufficiently similar.” Slip Op. (finding substantial evidence supporting the conclusion that this factor is “neutral” in the DuPont analysis).
Finally, although there was no proof of any actual confusion, the court also found this “neutral” because the products had only been overlapping on the market for four years. “Here, the relevant period during which actual confusion could have occurred was relatively short—from June 2014 to January 2018.”
Back in 2019, The IPKat reported on a referral from Belgium – Mircom, C-597/19 – asking the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) to clarify the treatment of (i) seeding under the InfoSoc Directive and (ii) ‘trolls’ under the Enforcement Directive, as well as the interplay between copyright enforcement and data protection law (GDPR).
Earlier this week, the Court issued its ruling, substantially endorsing the earlier Opinion of Advocate General (AG) Szpunar.
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With regard to 1., the Court noted that the retrieval of personal information of a subject who has damaged one’s own property may qualify as a legitimate interest. Turning to 2., identification of the owner of the connection is often only possible on the basis of the IP address and information provided by the ISP. Finally, in relation to 3., the mechanisms allowing the different rights and interests to be balanced are contained in the GDPR itself. The Court referred extensively to its La Quadrature du Net ruling and the need to comply with the provisions that embody users’ fundamental right to respect for private life and protection of personal data.
Ultimately, the CJEU ruled that Article 6(1)(f) GDPR, read in conjunction with Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, does not preclude either the upstream or downstream data processing requests, insofar they are justified, proportionate and not abusive and have their legal basis in a national legislative measure, within the meaning of Article 15(1) of Directive 2002/58, which limits the scope of the rules laid down in Articles 5 and 6 of that directive.
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Turning to the Enforcement Directive, the judgment – again correctly – does not premise the availability of protection upon the actual use of one’s own rights. This is also consistent with the principle, which however the Court did not expressly refer to, of copyright’s economic rights as being preventive in nature. All this said, the Court also reinstated the requirement of compliance with the overarching principles and limits found in Article 3 of the Enforcement Directive. In practice, this means that trolls of various types, including copyright ones, might be unable to invoke successfully protection under the Directive and its national transpositions.
Finally, the ruling offers some concrete guidance on how to balance copyright/IPR enforcement and data protection rules. This may be also useful when applying the provisions of the DSM Directive, including Article 17(9). Article 28 expressly requires any processing of personal data to be carried out in compliance with Directive 2002/58 and the GDPR.
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