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Posted in News Roundup at 12:42 am by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
We, me and my family, just came back from our vacation and we had a wonderful time, but there are no links this week. I just uploaded tutorials, I already created.
Josh and Kurt talk about what happens when you lose access to your Single Sign On provider. These providers have become critical to many of us, if we lose access to our SSO account we will lose access to many services.
Xargs is an important shell utility to know because it allows you to execute to pass standard input as an argument to another command. While many command line programs allow standard input to be used as a parameter (things like grep…
Occasionally I hear people talk about systemd being an init system and being incredibly bloated as part of the reason they don’t like it but it’s simply not an init system. It does contain one this is true but it’s a systems management suite and one part of that is an init system.
Linus Torvalds just released Linux 5.14-rc2 as the latest weekly test candidate of the maturing Linux 5.14 kernel.
Given that it’s a week past the Linux 5.14 merge window, there isn’t any shiny new features to talk about but a lot of fixes. Some fixes/improvements worth pointing out though that merged this week were the VirtualBox shared folder patches along with a lot of kernel changes throughout.
In total, 421 non-merge changesets were pulled into the mainline between -rc1 and -rc2.
f you have just installed the Debian 11 bullseye or 10 Buster on the VMWare Player workstation and want to install VMware tools, then here are the commands to follow.
After installing a Virtual machine on Vmware, a few things will not work as you want. For example- The display resolution of the installed virtual machine will not as per your computer; the host to guest drag & drop feature will not be available, Clipboard and other optimization would not be there. And to get them, we have to install VMware tools on our Virtual Machine whether it is Debian or any other.
Today we are looking at how to install Inkscape 1.1 on a Chromebook. Please follow the video/audio guide as a tutorial where we explain the process step by step and use the commands below.
Whether you are a network engineer or a regular user, learning the basics of some networking tools is just too important.
In this article, we’ve created a list of some of the most used networking tools in Linux, and we’ll try to get you familiar with these tools and their basic usage by using practical examples and explaining some core concepts.
This tutorial explains what is Mkusb and how to create persistent Live USB using Mkusb tool on Ubuntu and its variants.
Are you using pandas with a dataframe, possibly with a huge amount of data, and you want to filter a dataframe for rows where the column value is equal to something? If so, you can learn how to do this with pandas in this article.
In this video, we are looking at how to install LeoCAD on Linux Lite 5.4.
Vim is the enhanced version of vi text editor. Vim comes preinstalled on Ubuntu. The preinstalled version is minimal. To get the full version of vim, install vim using the apt or apt-get command.
Vim is a powerful text editor, which comes preinstalled in most Linux distributions. Ubuntu comes with Vim, vi, nano, Gedit (GUI), and many other text editors installed.
In this tutorial, we learn how to install VIM Text Editor on Ubuntu using apt.
PostgreSQL is an object-relational database system (ORDBMS). Being an open-source database project it is freely available and usable without a license fee. PostgreSQL was originally developed at the University of California and uses the simple BSD license.
It is a very advanced database system in the open-source area. PostgreSQL supports most parts of the SQL2003 standard and has a large number of its own extensions.
The user can expand the system with self-defined data types, operators, and functions. Apart from the support of referential integrity and advanced transaction management, PostgreSQL offers definitions of triggers and rules to regulate access to database objects.
Whether you are new to touch typing or trying to improve it, having installed a decent typing tutor is a must. If you are a GNU/Linux user, there there are a few different ones that you can try. We have ‘TIPP10‘, ‘KTouch‘, ‘nlkt‘, ‘gtypist‘ or ‘dvorak7min‘ (which is specially designed for the ‘Dvorak’ users).
Python is one of the most popular high-level languages, focusing on high-level and object-oriented applications from simple scrips to complex machine learning algorithms. Python 3.10 is the latest release and is not classed as stable compared the Python 3.9, but the final candidate is expected to be completed on the 4th of October 2021.
The open-source video transcoder HandBrake released new 1.4.0 version with exciting new features.
HandBrake 1.4.0 adds native 10 and 12-bit encoding support. Though it has limitations that some filters (e.g., Detelecine, Chroma Smooth, and more) do not currently support higher than 8-bit. With these filters enabled, you won’t benefit from the new feature.
You can select the new 10-bit / 12-bit encoder from the “Video codec” drop-down on the Video tab. For hardware encoders, the option will only be shown if the system supports it.
Sublime Merge is a cross-platform Git client developed on the same platform as Sublime Text. It comes with excellent features such as a three-way merging tool, side-by-side diffs, and a powerful search function. In this guide, we’ll show you how to set up the software on Linux.
Here we learn the commands to install TeamViewer on Debian 11 or 10 using the terminal to connect a remote desktop of providing assistant.
TeamViewer is an application for easy, fast, and secure remote access to PCs and teamwork. TeamViewer enables devices to be controlled and maintained without having to be on site. TeamViewer is free for private use. TeamViewer Meeting for 10 participants is included in all three editions- Business, Corporate, and Premium. Whereas TeamViewer Pilot is a solution for mobile devices for remote maintenance and remote support. Problem rectification and analysis run in real-time.
Video editors are incredibly powerful and vastly complex applications which can be used to edit your amateur videos into professional looking masterpieces, complete with a background score, but only if you have the patience to master the interface. Sometimes all you need is a quick cut of unwanted parts from a video, or to merge some clips together. Feature-rich video editors would be overkill for those tasks. Instead, you can use VidCutter, a minimalist video editor that uses Ffmpeg to perform surgery on your video files.
Released under the GPLv3 license, VidCutter follows the old Unix philosophy of doing one thing well. Unlike more complex applications such as DaVinci Resolve, Adobe Premiere etc., VidCutter is designed to only cut video files, or join them together, albeit without any special effects. This makes VidCutter ideal for home users, or even amateur broadcasters who only needs a few tweaks to their video before publishing.
We all have memories or just pretty images that we’d quite happily be reminded about every single day. What’s the best way to do this? To set them as your background, of course, on your computer or Android phone.
It used to be a bit fiddly setting images as your Android wallpaper because instead of cropping images that were too wide, it would sprawl them across your several home screens. Nowadays, a wallpaper stays stationary by default, and Android has a quick and easy way of cropping it down to size. Let’s see how to turn any picture into wallpaper with and without cropping.
The handheld gaming PC runs SteamOS 3.0 and Valve claims that developers’ existing game builds will likely work right out of the box.
“A handheld PC/console hybrid running the SteamOS fork of Arch Linux, and it’s an open platform where users are free to install software or their choosing – including Windows and other stores.”
The Steam Deck runs SteamOS 3.0 based on Arch Linux, and it features Valve’s Proton compatibility layer to run many games built for Windows.
By default, the Deck runs the SteamOS fork of Arch Linux, which allows Steam and its games to run and play as seamlessly as possible.
With the alpha release of the Godot 4.0 open-source game engine approaching, a blog post today detailed the current graphics API support plans around this major game engine update.
As readers should know by now, one of the major focuses of Godot 4.0 was on overhauling its renderer in part to bring up Vulkan API support. The renderer design and all code was overhauled for bringing up Vulkan support and enabling support for other modern rendering techniques and features to compete with the proprietary game engines.
Meta: The first thing I have to announce is, that I’m tired of trying to come up with a cool name for every blog post. I’ll just use This Week In Tok from now on.
Secret (E2EE) Chats
Tok now supports secret chats, which are indicated in the chat list using a lock icon. Secret chats are Telegram’s E2EE solution, and since the clients (like Tok) are open source and the algorithim well-documented, you can easily verify the implementation for yourself. Wish I could say the same for some other E2EE chats.
I’ve been quiet the last few months. With an increased (at-work) workload and the start of returning to a normal life, I simply haven’t had the time to sit down and focus on FOSS. Despite that, I still managed to contribute some worthwhile improvements to elementary.
rlxos is an independent Linux distribution which currently provides a single desktop edition with the GNOME desktop for 64-bit (x86_64) computers. The project has an interesting approach to working with software packages and different versions of the operating system. “System boots from a single system image file just like a live boot and save unique cache on hard disk. Multiple version of system images reside together on same partition and you can select which version to use from boot menu.”
rlxos also offers a digital assistant and an immutable filesystem. This means the base filesystem remains the same while changes the user makes are stored in a separate layer. This, in theory, means we can revert to a working system at any time by simply not loading the layer with our changes or upgrades. The distribution appears to have a focus on portable packages and its website mentions being able to work with Flatpak, Snap, and AppImage bundles.
Summer is there, Pat is about to release a candidate for Slackware 15.0 which will likely last for 2 years, and the current code seems as stable as it can be : so it’s time for a Zenwalk Current release.
It can be considered as a milestone release, most packages have been rebuilt down here or upstream, and it confirm some of the choices that where applied since the beginning of 2020 : Pipewire as the sound daemon, with mostly all existing Bluetooth codecs available from APTX to LDAC.
Desktop is the latest XFCE 4.16, with the special Zenwalk layout (NEXT/Windowmaker inspired dock system, with unique panel placement for ultra-ergonomic use of the whole desktop place on modern wide screens).
Kernel is 5.13.2, with Elogind and PAM, and thankfully : still no Systemd :).
Of course : Flatpak is present, and as usual, configured out of the box so that you can install nearly anything on Zenwalk.
If you have been working on open standard RISC-V ISA CPU cores, there is a high chance that you have come across WARP-V. For newbies, WARP-V is a RISC-V CPU core generator written in TL-Verilog (Transaction-Level Verilog) that supports not only RISC-V but also MIPS ISA. WARP-V has been in discussion for a while due to its unparalleled architectural scalability in a small amount of code.
Russia’s Yadro and subsidiary Syntacore have announced an effort to develop homegrown processors based on the free and open RISC-V architecture.
A report in local newspaper Ведомости, first spotted in the west by AnandTech, pointed to state-owned Rostec providing up to 30bn rubles (around $400m, £290m) in backing to Yadro and Syntacore to build a range of devices featuring RISC-V chips.
A quartet of computer science boffins have showcased work on bringing the OpenCL programming framework to a wide range of RISC-V chips – improving their suitability for highly parallel workloads in science and beyond.
Born at the University of California at Berkeley in 2010, following an earlier research project from the 1980s dubbed Berkeley RISC, which would eventually become the SPARC architecture, RISC-V is both free and open source. As a result, anyone can build chips implementing the RISC-V architecture and can modify and expand it at will, adding new features or tweaking existing ones as required.
Out this Sunday is the latest update to GNU Binutils as this important collection of binary utilities common to Linux and other platforms.
GNU Binutils 2.37 isn’t the most exciting update in recent memory but does bring some new improvements like support for Arm’s new RME extension and other maintenance/janitorial work.
We are very excited to announce that also for 2021 our friends from the GNU Toolchain are going to join the Linux Plumbers Conference with an additional track: the GNU Tools track. The track will run for the 5 days of the conference.
It’s hard to believe, but we are now half-way through Google Summer of Code. Wow, does time fly. 6 weeks ago Kalendar let you view events from your local and online accounts — now, it does a lot more than that!
As homebound students and teachers looked for online resources during the pandemic, many turned to Scratch, a free coding system for kids developed by the MIT Media Lab.
The first humans to discover Antarctica weren’t seafaring Westerners but rather Polynesians, who found the coldest continent 1,300 years ago, a new study suggests.
Researchers in New Zealand assessed oral histories about a Polynesian explorer spying an icy, mountainous continent untouched by the sun. To find the evidence, they sifted through “gray literature,” or historical reports that weren’t published in peer-reviewed journals, and integrated them with Indigenous oral histories and artwork. This deep dive into Indigenous history revealed that Polynesians likely discovered the southernmost continent more than a millennium before Westerners first spotted it in 1820, according to most historic reports.
The Earth contains about one trillion species of microbes — only about one-tenth of which have been identified. A single human can house 100 trillion microbes, creating a single microbiome that serves an ecosystem of microbes.
Microbes connect and transform in myriad ways, creating and combining and separating microbiomes anew. How can we begin to parse out how microbiomes differ, how they are similar, how they evolved and how they may change in the future?
An international team of researchers may have the answer. They published a scale-free, fully connected search-based network to explore the connectedness of microbiomes across the world on July 13 in mSystems.
The father of a rising senior at Palo Alto High School is suing the Palo Alto Unified School District after his son was prohibited from attending an in-person summer class without a mask.
The father, whose name is being withheld to protect the identity of the underage student and who also is the attorney in the case, claims that his son cannot wear a mask because he is “unable to wear a face mask safely” and a “speech/communication disability … makes it difficult for him to pronounce certain letters and sounds,” according to the lawsuit that was filed on July 7 in Santa Clara County Superior Court.
The suit claims that the student will suffer damages from being barred from class because he will not be able to graduate on time if he is absent for more than three days. According to court documents, the student was enrolled in the district’s summer school credit recovery course that is two and half weeks long and prohibits students from missing more than three days to receive credit.
Legislation that will help to build a future “European Health Union” is making its way through the EU legislative process. It includes a greater role for EU health agencies in making preparations for future health emergencies.
Telecom providers, including wireless carriers, are at risk of disruption of network service if the bug in SBR Carrier is exploited.
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One of these can also be used for RCE, Juniper said. That bug (CVE-2021-0277, with an 8.8 CVSS rating) is an out-of-bounds read vulnerability afflicting Junos OS (versions 12.3, 15.1, 17.3, 17.4, 18.1, 18.2, 18.3, 18.4, 19.1, 19.2, 19.3, 19.4, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3 and 20.4), and Junos OS Evolved (all versions).
Junos OS and Junos OS Evolved are network operating systems that power Juniper’s enterprise routers and switches. The former runs on FreeBSD, while the latter runs a version of Linux.
The issue exists in the processing of specially crafted LLDP frames by the Layer 2 Control Protocol Daemon (l2cpd). LLDP is the protocol that network devices use to broadcast their identity, capabilities and neighbors on a local area network (usually over wired Ethernet).
“Continued receipt and processing of these frames, sent from the local broadcast domain, will repeatedly crash the l2cpd process and sustain the DoS condition,” Juniper said in its advisory, issued Thursday.
In addition to the patch, this bug has a few workarounds. For instance, users can configure a device to not load the l2cpd daemon. However, if it’s disabled, certain protocols (RSTP, MSTP, VSTP, ERP, xSTP and ERP, among others) won’t work.
Microsoft released an XL-sized bundle of security fixes for its products for this month’s Patch Tuesday, and other vendors are close behind in issuing updates.
SonicWall has warned that its older Secure Mobile Access (SMA) 100 series and Secure Remote Access (SRA) gateways are being attacked in the wild by crooks to spread ransomware – and as some of those devices are end-of-life, don’t expect any patches to protect them.
In an emergency alert on Wednesday, the networking biz said miscreants are “actively targeting” the equipment to, as we understand it, steal credentials from them to compromise networks for “an imminent ransomware campaign.”
Cybersecurity firm Sophos has acquired Linux security vendor Capsule8 in a bid to extend its protection cover to Linux servers.
Capsule8 offers a threat detection platform for securing Linux production environments across bare-metal and virtualized servers, as well as containers, whether deployed on-premise or in the cloud.
Acquired for an unknown sum, Sophos intends to integrate Capsule8’s protection platform into its Adaptive Cybersecurity Ecosystem (ACE) platform.
It began in February with a tweet by pop star Rihanna that sparked widespread condemnation of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s handling of massive farmer protests near the capital, souring an already troubled relationship between the government and Twitter.
Moving to contain the backlash, officials hit Twitter with multiple injunctions to block hundreds of tweets critical of the government. Twitter complied with some and resisted others.
The U.P. Population Bill came and it came with lot of prejudices. One of the prejudices is the idea that Muslims create or procreate to have the most children. Even with data is presented as shared above from NFHS National Family Health Survey which is supposed to carry our surveys every few years did the last one around 4 years back. The analysis from it has been instrumental not only in preparing graphs as above but also sharing about what sort of death toll must have been in rural India. And as somebody who have had the opportunity in the past, can vouch that you need to be extremely lucky if something happens to you when you are in a rural area.
Even in places like Bodh Gaya (have been there) where millions of tourists come as it is one of the places not to be missed on the Buddhism tourist circuit, the medical facilities are pretty underwhelming. I am not citing it simply because there are too many such newspaper reports from even before the pandemic, and both the State and the Central Govt. response has been dismal. Just a few months back, they were recalled. There were reports of votes being bought at INR 1000/- (around $14) and a bottle or two of liquor. There used to be a time when election monitoring whether national or state used to be a thing, and you had LTO’s (Long-time Observers) and STO’s (Short-Term Observers) to make sure that the election has been neutral. This has been on the decline in this regime, but that probably is for another time altogether. Although, have to point out the article which I had shared a few months ago on the private healthcare model is flawed especially for rural areas. Instead of going for cheap, telemedicine centers that run some version of a Linux distro. And can provide a variety of services, I know Kerala and Tamil Nadu from South India have experimented in past but such engagements need to be scaled up. This probably will come to know when the next time I visit those places (sadly due to the virus, not anytime soonish.:( ) .
Whether you are a socialist who believes in a clean break, a dirty break, or no break from the Democratic Party, ranked-choice voting (RCV)—especially for proportional representation on legislative bodies—should be a top priority now more than ever. These reforms are just as much a principled matter of democratic rights—i.e., the ability of voters to have our preferences reflected in our votes—as it is a strategic and tactical concern for the electoral prospects of the Left.
RCV in single-seat races eliminates the spoiler problem that powerfully discourages votes for independent Left candidates. In multi-seat races, RCV creates proportional representation and thus eliminates the winner-take-all problem that enables a single political party to elect every office and monopolize power within a given district.
As we fight back against the Republican assault on voting rights and impartial elections, it is time to expand the pro-democracy agenda to include the right to have all political viewpoints represented in proportion to their support in society.
A group of Hong Kong Wikipedia editors have convened an urgent meeting and shared guidelines to prevent doxxing, after users from mainland China allegedly threatened to report the group to the city’s national security police. Representatives from the group told HKFP they are hoping to seek assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation after a meeting.
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Screenshots allegedly taken from a QQ chat group of mainland Wikipedia editors showed that a user under the handle “Walter Grassroot” threatened to report members of the Wikimedia Community User Group Hong Kong (WMHKG) to the Hong Kong national security police hotline. The group of around 30 avid Wikipedia users is affiliated with the Wikimedia Foundation.
Today marks the celebration of the life of one of South Africa’s most esteemed freedom fighters and statesmen, Nelson Mandela, and organisations in South Africa are rallying to honour his legacy.
Citizens are encouraged to spend 67 minutes in service to others, symbolic of the number of years Mandela fought for social justice. These acts of kindness usually take place on his birthday on July 18, known as Mandela Day, but also throughout July.
Local organisations are doing their best to make a difference.
Chefs with Compassion (CWC) is a volunteer-based food rescue organisation that finds surplus food and turns it into meals for poor people.
The organisation aims to cook 67 000 litres of soup to feed people in honour of Madiba. While their target is set in litres, this translates to 268 000 meals.
Recent antitrust lawsuits against major tech companies such as Facebook, Google and Amazon have attracted bipartisan support but have so far failed to achieve results, with three complaints dismissed since May.
The Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC) complaint against Facebook alleging a monopoly in personal social networking, along with a complaint filed by 48 state attorneys general, was dismissed with leave to amend in June, while an antitrust suit alleging Google used its dominance in search results to acquire an illegal digital advertising monopoly was dismissed with leave to amend in May.
Counsel from India discuss how counterfeiters are finding innovative ways to traffic fake goods – and how in-house lawyers can fight back
It seems I’m the only person on the Internet who didn’t know sending email to Google with bit.ly links will tank your deliverability. To my credit, I’ve been answering deliverability support questions for 16 years and this has never come up.
Until last week.
On 28 June 2021, it was announced the creation of the Latin American Network of Intellectual Property and Gender. For such purpose, a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed between INAPI (Chile), INDECOPI (Peru), RN (Costa Rica), SIC (Colombia) and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO, as an honorary member).
For the first time since the reform of trademark law, which among other things introduced sound marks, the European Court ruled about a sound mark. The sound mark “tin plop” was devoid of distinctive character, the CFI ruled – with interesting aspects of case law relating to sound marks.
Last Friday I noted that the U.K. Supreme Court had issued its decision in Secretary of State for Health v. Servier Laboratories Ltd., [2021] UKSC 24, and I said that I might have more to say about it in the next few days. Lord Hamblen’s opinion strikes me as very well-reasoned, so I don’t have a lot to say, but here goes.
The case involves an action for “unlawful means” brought by the U.K. Secretary of State of Health, as successor in interest to various National Health Service bodies. The defendants are drug companies that obtained a European Patent on an “alpha crystalline form of the tert-butylamine salt of perindopril,” a drug used for treating high blood pressure that is marketed under the brand name “Coversyl.” The patent survived an opposition proceeding before the EPO, and the defendants used the patent to delay the introduction of a generic form of the drug into the U.K. market. The Patents Court for England and Wales thereafter found the patent to be invalid on both novelty and nonobviousness grounds. The Court of Appeal upheld this decision, and the EPO Technical Board of Appeal revoked the patent in 2009. On the basis of this procedural history, the Secretary of Health alleged that “the respondent practised deceit on the EPO and/or the courts, with the intention of profiting at the expense of the appellants,” in that “the patent was obtained, defended and enforced on the basis of representations . . . that the third respondent knew to be false, or that were made with reckless indifference as to their truth” (para.12). Plaintiffs claimed damages of more than £200 million.
Another hurdle against the long-awaited UPC ( European Unified Patent Court) has fallen: The Federal Constitutional Court rejects the appeal. A violation of fundamental rights was not sufficiently credible.
After substantive examination, if an Examiner considers that a European patent application meets the requirements of the EPC, the Examiner will issue a communication indicating their intention to grant the application (a communication under Rule 71(3) EPC).
The communication is accompanied by the version of the application text that the EPO intends to grant, known as the “Druckexemplar”. It may include amendments suggested by the Examiner to address any minor deficiencies that were not rectified during examination. The Druckexemplar is taken to be the authentic text of a granted patent, and so it is important to check the text thoroughly.
What happens next depends upon whether the applicant is happy with the text of the Druckexemplar. If the applicant does not reply to the communication within 4 months, by completing the acts under A or B below, the application will be deemed withdrawn.
China has been tirelessly investing effort in the enhancement of patent quality and examination performance to ensure the core legislative purpose of the Patent Law for encouraging innovative development is closely observed. In order to strengthen the indicator of technical innovation, China has re-emphasized the importance of both quantity and quality in the technology embodied in the patents. Unfortunately, reportedly irregular filings of patent applications—breaches of the duty of good faith—have occurred; such irregular filings were explainable in part by the availability of economic incentives in the form of local authority subsidies for patent filings, although all forms of subsidies for patent prosecution are ordered to be canceled by the end of June 2021.
CNIPA categorized the irregular filings into a non-exhaustive list of nine types of activity as per the “Measures on Regulation of Filing Patent Applications (关于规范申请专利行为的办法)” published in March 2021. The first type of activity comprises “multiple applications filed simultaneously or successively that are obviously the same invention-creation, or are essentially formed by simple combinations of different invention-creation features or elements”. The ninth and last type is a catch-all clause to encompass any other abnormal patent filings and related activities either in breach of the principle of good faith or in defiance of regular patenting practices. These bad faith activities were further clarified in April in a CNIPA’s official document titled “Interpretation of the Measures on Regulation of Filing Patent Applications (关于规范申请专利行为的办法解读).”
The intention to curb bad faith filings is commendable. Nevertheless Tsai, Lee & Chen happened to encounter some instances of supposedly regular cases being spotted by the examiner as having been filed abnormally.
Until last Friday, implementation of the European Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement and availability of a Unitary Patent for multiple EU states had been delayed by two Complaints for interim injunctions against German ratification of the UPC Agreement.
On Friday, 9 July 2021, the German Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) rejected the requests for interim injunctions. Because this order was based on findings that the constitutional complaints are inadmissible, it appears very unlikely that there will be a hearing on the merits of the case and it appears likely that the German government will soon ratify the UPC Agreement.
The UPC Preparatory Committee announced on July 9th that it will publish a timeline and a more detailed plan for the start and execution of the Provisional Application Period “in due course” on its website. Our best guess is that the UPC could be ready to open and the EPO will begin granting Unitary Patents in mid to late 2022.
Katy Perry and patent law might not seem to be obvious bedfellows. However, the lyrics to her hit song Hot n Cold do capture rather well the turbulent nature and recent drama of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) and Unitary Patent (UP) project.
It is getting increasingly difficult to keep track of all the developments of the patent battle around the CRISPR-Cas9 technology. In a new turn of the story, patent EP 3 241 902 owned by University of California has been revoked by an Opposition Division of the European Patent Office.
The long-running process of setting up a new European patent court and unitary patent system should shortly be moving into its final phase following a ruling by a German constitutional court.
On 9 July 2021, the German Federal Constitutional Court announced the rejection of two applications for a preliminary injunction against the German Act of Approval to the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court (UPCA).
The latest round of constitutional complaints against Germany’s ratification of the UPCA were filed in December 2020 after the German Bundestag and Bundesrat approved the draft law ratifying the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court.
Two applications at the German Constitutional Court (FCC) for preliminary injunctions against German ratification of the Unified Patent Court Agreement (UPCA) have been rejected, according to today’s Press Release of the FCC.
The rejection clears the path for the German Federal President to sign the bill passed by both houses of parliament in December 2020 into law. Signing of the bill is the last step necessary before the UPCA and Protocol on Provisional Application (PPA) ratifications can be deposited by Germany.
Law360 (July 15, 2021, 7:47 PM EDT) — The Patent Trial and Appeal Board turned away 104 petitions for discretionary reasons in the first half of 2021, but more than 70% of those were in the first quarter of the year, according to new Unified Patents data.
Between January and March 2021, the PTAB rejected 74 petitions on procedural grounds, compared to 30 in the following three months, Unified Patents said July 6. Despite the dip, the group — which supports the PTAB invalidating weak patents — projected that number will double over the rest of the year, ending around 208 denials.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit has historically equated a plaintiff’s possession of a right to sue under Section 281 of the Patent Act with the plaintiff’s standing under Article III, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution.[1]
In recent years, the Federal Circuit issued key decisions overturning that precedent: Lone Star Silicon Innovations LLC v. Nanya Technology Corp. in 2019 and Schwendimann v. Arkwright Advanced Coating Inc. in 2020.[2]
Notwithstanding these decisions, district courts continue to issue conflicting rulings on whether a plaintiff must possess a right to sue under the Patent Act for Article III standing, specifically…
Sources at a research hospital, Novartis, IBM and elsewhere say the USPTO’s move is encouraging and could force tech to ‘compromise or else’
14 July 2021: The US court of appeals has upheld a previous decision that confirms LONGi products did not infringe on a US patent from Hanwha Q-Cells, LONGi has announced. The patent is related to a method of manufacturing solar cells with a surface-passivating dielectric double layer.
LONGi said it also believes that the relevant products do not infringe another patent in Europe related to the same method. The company has filed an opposition to that patent’s validity with the European Patent Office, a procedure that is still pending.
In addition, a patent from Hanwha Q-Cells in the US covering a type of PERC solar cell with a three-layer passivation structure has been invalidated by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of the US Patent and Trademark Office, according to LONGi.
As if Biogen didn’t have enough on its plate these days, now comes concern for its multiple sclerosis blockbuster Tysabri in Europe.
With Europe revoking a patent for the drug earlier this month, Biogen could face biosimilar competition earlier than expected, Bernstein analyst Ronny Gal wrote in his weekly note to investors. In some markets, a copycat could arrive as soon as next year.
The EPO yesterday announced the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) decision in G1/21 (ViCo oral proceedings). The EPO press release can be read here.
In what will be a disappointment to many, the EBA has limited its answer to the legality of mandatory oral proceedings during a period of general emergency. The question of whether new Article 15a of the Rules of Procedure of the Boards of Appeal is permitted under the EPC has therefore not been addressed. This new article permits Boards of Appeal to hold oral proceedings by ViCo whenever “the Board considers it appropriate to do so”, i.e. even in the absence of a state of general emergency.
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The EBA thus appears to have avoided answering the question in G1/21 that most EPO users actually wanted it to answer. The decision thereby dodges the controversy (and any potential conflict with the EPO President…) but perpetuates legal uncertainty. There has been little disagreement that ViCo oral proceedings during the COVID-19 pandemic are necessary. The debate has chiefly consisted of whether there is justification for moving to a new norm of ViCo oral proceedings post-pandemic. As the CIPA president, Alicia Instone, commented in a statement it is hoped that “when the reasoned decision is issued, it will provide guidance into the matter post-pandemic. We fear that otherwise, we will see the broader issue revisited at this high level pretty quickly.”
Pleading Standards: The starting point of a civil lawsuit is the filing of the complaint that makes a claim for relief. FRCP 3. In order to properly state a claim, the rules require “a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief.” FRCP 8. For many years, the rules included an Appendix of Form Complaints deemed legally sufficient to satisfy R. 8. Form 18 focused on patent infringement and included a bare-bones set of allegations that (1) the plaintiff owns a particular patent and (2) the defendant has infringed that patent. (Image of Form 18 below). In general, Form 18 was plaintiff friendly, making it easy to file a patent infringement lawsuit without providing any details beyond the patent number at issue. That approach was in place for a number of years and only began to crumble with the Supreme Court’s decision in Bell v. Twombly, 550 U.S. 544 (2007), followed by Ashcroft v. Iqbal, 556 U.S. 662 (2009). Those cases interpreted the “short and plain statement” requirement as requiring “facial plausibility” that can be satisfied by the inclusion of factual allegations that lead to a reasonable inference of liability. Still, even after Iqbal, the form-pleading-sufficiency rule was still in place in a way that forestalled complete implementation of the Iqbal regime. In 2015, Form 18 was removed and the transformation complete.
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Regarding infringement, the court found that a complaint may be sufficient without an element-by-element infringement analysis. “A plaintiff is not required to plead infringement on an element-by-element basis.” Rather, the focus of complaint sufficiency is notice — a complaint needs to provide fair notice of what activities by the defendant constitute infringement.
Patents protect the technical ideas that underpin the way software works. The catch is that patents are more difficult and costly to obtain than other IP rights.
”We’re intensively engaged in research in and developing our own approaches and techniques. It was with the wholehearted help of Mladen Vukmir and William Zupancic from Vukmir & Associates that we submitted our first patent, which first goes to the EPO (European Patent Office), and then to the USA, for our own deep learning techniques on structured data. This is just the beginning because we aren’t going to stop innovating,” said Heidi Chenan.
As the EUIPO prepares to consider whether ‘Iceland’ should be a trademark, counsel discuss the pros and cons of location-named brands
Readers may remember that, back in September 2020, the CJEU considered whether there was a likelihood of confusion where a mark being filed for registration was that of MESSI, renowned football player that everyone has heard of in one context or another (the existing mark upon which opposition was based which was ‘MASSI’). This case (joined cases C-449/18 P and C-474/18 P) reaffirmed a significant clarification of trade mark law set out by the earlier EU General Court decision – namely, that visual and aural similarities could be counteracted by conceptual differences (see IPKat commentary here).
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As a preliminary point, the General Court (GC) set out that the the relevant territory for the purposes of assessing likelihood of confusion is that of the European Union as a whole, but that the Board of Appeal did not err by only taking into account the perception of the English-speaking public.
Turning to the degree of distinctiveness and relative weight of the elements of the signs, it noted that the verbal elements of the mark would be perceived as a first name and surname. However, consumers’ perception of signs made up of a person’s first name and surname would vary from country to country, and one would have to take into account the specific features of each case. In this regard, the GC disagreed with the automatic presumption of the Board of Appeal that the surname ‘Cyrus’ would be the more dominant element of the earlier sign.
As such, taking into account the fact that neither ‘Miley’ nor ‘Cyrus’ are common names, that the singer is known by both names together, and that the English-speaking public (which the earlier Board of Appeal specifically referred to) does not find a surname more distinctive than a first name, the General Court determined that both elements were equally distinctive, and that the Board of Appeal had been wrong to find that ‘Miley’ would be perceived as a less dominant element compared to the element ‘Cyrus’. This would not be affected by the assertion that the public would pay greater attention to the beginning of a mark than its end.
The Mexican company Grupo Bimbo makes more bread than any other company — including Wonder Bread and Sara Lee brands in the USA. Bimbo is attempting to register a mark for its “ARTESANO” line of bread — after apparently selling more than $1 billion in pre-packaged sliced bread product.
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Bimbo has now filed a civil action under 15 U.S.C. 1071(b) seeking a declaration from the District Court that its mark is not generic but instead is distinctive.
In a video released on 13 July 2021, Miguel Ángel Domínguez Morales (President of the Mexican Tequila Regulatory Council) indicated that an amicable agreement had been reached with Heineken after CRT had initiated several legal actions in the European Union involving the use of the word ‘Tequila’ in Desperados beer.
Although the terms remain confidential, Miguel highlighted that the agreement is beneficial to both parties and that “Tequila” continues to be strongly protected in the European Union [its second-largest export market after the USA].
Tequila is protected in the European Union pursuant to the Agreement between Mexico and the European Community on the mutual recognition and protection of designations for spirit drinks of 1997, as amended in 2004 and 2020.
It certainly feels like the CDSM Directive has been the hottest topic in copyright law for quite some time now. If we had to be more specific and identify one main protagonist, the answer would unequivocally be: Article 17. Since its birth with the European Commission’s proposal, all the way through to the guidance from the Commission, the limited implementation efforts at a national level and the pending Polish challenge, the AG opinion of which is scheduled for later this month, Article 17 has been subject to attack and debate on many fronts. There has been a great deal of interest and discussion around burning issues such as how licensing could reasonably work in practice, what constitutes ‘best efforts’, the safeguarding of fundamental rights, and whether censorship could be avoided thanks to existing technology.
We have a vast wealth of posts on the blog on various aspects of Article 17, presenting many different perspectives and opinions. So much has happened in the past year in this respect, that before the summer months fully take over our agendas, it is worth taking a pause and a looking back at our top 10 most-read posts on Article 17 from the past 12 months.
Recently, a copyright infringement suit had been filed before the District Court, Trivandrum, against Facebook India. (CNR Number: KLTV010019372021) The reason for filing the suit was that certain unknown people had posted without authorisation original sound recordings created by Vempati Ravi Shankar (the plaintiff’s late husband) on the defendant’s social media platforms – Facebook and Instagram. Being his sole legal heir, the copyright in these works is held by Sweety Priyanka Vempati Ravi Shankar. (hereinafter Priyanka) She had notified Facebook and Instagram regarding the presence of infringing sound recordings on their platform, but they failed to takedown it down and hence, the present suit. On 2nd July, the court granted an ad-interim injunction in the plaintiff’s favour, ordering the takedown of the infringing content.
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Section 57 of the Copyright Act, 1957 provides for moral rights that vest with the author even when he assigns the other rights in respect of a work, and moral rights are of two kinds – the right to integrity (to prevent modification of the work which is prejudicial to the honour and reputation of the author) and the right to paternity (to claim authorship of the work). In the present case, people had been posting Shankar’s sound recordings accompanied by his name on Facebook and Instagram. So, violation of the right to paternity cannot be claimed.
Right to integrity stipulates that an action can be taken against ‘distortion, mutilation, modification or other act in relation to the said work if such distortion, mutilation, modification or other act would be prejudicial to his honour or reputation’. If the provision is read literally, based on the limited information regarding the posting of the plaintiff’s works, the moral right to integrity does not seem to have been violated in the present case.
If the phrase ‘other act in relation to the said work’ is interpreted expansively, the use of a sound recording by unknown persons for commercial purposes could come under the ambit of this section. Rishabh had earlier argued for a broader interpretation including ‘mere use’ within it, when a song for which Javed Akhtar had written lyrics was used in a new, political film. Here, use of a work means use in a manner not intended by the author, such as use by a political party. Nikhil has also considered how moral rights can be utilised for preventing misappropriation of songs for political campaigns.
In relation to a copyright infringement suit filed before the District Court, Trivandrum, against Facebook India, which also alleges violation of moral and posthumous celebrity rights, Spicy IP considered the various factors at play before the court.
Traditionally, the last few days of the Term yield an impressive harvest of cases out of Luxembourg.
Amidst the flurry of this year’s judgments, the EU General Court ruled (T-185/19 Public.Resource.Org) on a challenge by two non-profit organisations against a decision by the European Commission not to grant free and public access to harmonised standards adopted by the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN). In doing so, the Court draws arguments from copyright law, which warrant closer attention.
The challenge to the status quo was brought by the non-profits Public.Resource.Org, Inc. and Right to Know, the former of which was also at the origin of the challenge in US Federal Courts regarding the free accessibility to the consolidated laws of the State of Georgia, which resulted in a ruling by the US Supreme Court last year [IPKat here].
Article 4(2) first indent, of Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001, regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents, states that the institutions shall refuse access to a document where disclosure would undermine the protection of commercial interests of a natural or legal person, including intellectual property.
The applicants argued that the European Commission had misinterpreted and/or misapplied Article 4(2), since this provision does not protect the requested harmonised standards, as (1) no copyright protection of the requested harmonised standards is possible because they are part of EU Law, and (2) the requested harmonised standards lack originality and therefore do not benefit from copyright protection. In the Court’s analysis, two salient points intersect with these arguments: the role of national copyright law, and the question of copyrightability itself.
Following the #BrokenRecord and #FixStreaming campaigns, the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee launched into an inquiry into the impact of music streaming on artists, record labels and the sustainability of the wider music industry. [Katposts here.] Over 200 pieces of written evidence were submitted, and further witnesses were called including artists, songwriters, producers, labels and streaming platforms. Subsequently, the Committee Report on the Economics of Music Streaming has been published, calling for “a complete reset” of music streaming and the need for significant change within the music industry. Some of the key regulatory recommendations are discussed in this post. *Disclaimer: I submitted evidence to this inquiry (here), which is cited by the report and supports many of the recommendations made by the committee.
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Issue: Music playlist curators have an important role in the discovery and consumption of digital music and are influential in how creators are remunerated, but the extent of their paid-for activity is currently undisclosed. Likewise, the selection methods of platform editorial playlists are not transparent, therefore the influence of behind-the-scenes agreements is unclear.
Evidence: Several creators argued that editorial playlists favour those signed to major labels, claiming that 85% of music on Spotify is major owned and comprise 90% of editorial playlists. In fact, one performer asserted that some playlist curators offered to promote independent performers for a fee, creating a black market for playlisting. My evidence recommended that playlist curators should be classified as influencers and therefore regulated under ASA standards.
Recommendation: Where curators are paid, or receive benefits in kind, for playlisting, the report recommends that they are subject to a code of practice developed by the ASA, similar to social media influencers, to ensure that the decisions they make are transparent and ethical.
Impact: The ASA currently provides specific guidance for influencers, which says that the code applies to branded content posted on social media when the person is paid in some way, regardless of how many followers they may have. It specifies, and to some extent enforces, that influencers must be transparent about their sponsorships and partnerships by ensuring that advertisements are clearly labelled as such. If this recommendation is taken forward, we could see a change in the way that playlists are curated and presented to users. It is likely that a similar transparency system would be implemented, whereby playlist editors and publishers must declare the relationship between themselves and the choice of tracks. #It’sNotArbitrary #Ad
Overall, the DCMS Committee music streaming report is comprehensive and valiant. It makes momentous and multifarious recommendations that could have transformative consequences for the music industry. We might not be waiting too long to begin to see the fruits of this labour, since the Music Streaming Bill has already been presented by Kevin Brennan MP to the House of Commons and the Second Reading debate will take place on 3rd December 2021.
Is Article 17 of Directive 2019/790 (DSMD) compatible with the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, notably its Article 11 and the principle of freedom of expression and information?
According to Poland, the answer should be in the negative.
Indeed, shortly after the adoption of the Directive in 2019, this country lodged a complaint (C-401/19) before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), seeking the partial or – as a subsidiary claim – complete annulment of the provision.
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