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Posted in News Roundup at 7:57 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers
A concept-art of Torreya, who appears on episode 35 of Pepper&Carrot. I was a bit sad with her ceremony clothes, not really well adapted to riding a dragon. So, here is more work to update her character design for episode 36. I made this artwork while testing the Gaomon M10K 2018. I finished the video editing this evening, release of the video is planed for within the next 48h.
I see that work is underway to support the “M1” (ARM) based Macs.
While people are obviously and unfortunately buying Macs, which Apple forces into early retirement when there’s nothing wrong with the computer and it should have many years of service life left (I mean come on, there’s still a few people using PowerPC Macs for _something_.), and it will be important to have an OS that works once the people buying these things get tired of them or give up because Apple says “no more updates” in a few years, I think that people looking for a dedicated GNU/Linux computer need to look elsewhere.
A while ago, I noticed a project to create a compatible replacement for the Hitachi SuperH. The Instruction Set Architecture for the SH, which is the processor used by the Sega Dreamcast (which already ran GNU/Linux at one point!) is so old now that most of it is not covered by any patents.
Instead of taking on the, likely impossible, task of getting a dedicated Fab vendor, the j-core system is implemented in firmware that can be loaded onto a cheap ($50 USD, apparently) Field Programmable Gate Array.
The Linux kernel is trying again to enhance the low-latency playback mode of its USB audio driver.
Takashi Iwai of SUSE who oversees the Linux kernel’s sound subsystem and has been responsible for many of the sound improvements to the kernel drivers over the past number of years has taken a fresh stab at enhancing the low-latency playback support.
HandBrake is an open-source, GPL-licensed, multiplatform, multithreaded video transcoder, available for MacOS X, Linux and Windows. Handbrake can process most common multimedia files and any DVD or BluRay sources that do not contain any kind of copy protection.
WordPress is considered one of the best and easiest content management system (CMS) tools. It doesn’t require any coding skills and web-developing skills to get started with WordPress. There are many ways to install the WordPress CMS on a server to localhost, and some of them are easy, and others are a bit trickier. You can set up WordPress with Ansible despite the conventional method of installing WordPress and other CMS applications. Moreover, Ansible is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Linux kernel 5.14 is out and is famous for testing out with many new features, support, and security. The Linux 5.14 kernel release has gone through seven release candidates over the last two months and benefits from the contributions of 1,650 different developers. Those that contribute to Linux kernel development include individual contributors and prominent vendors like Intel, AMD, IBM, Oracle, and Samsung.
Shoutcast is proprietary software that is being used to stream media over the Internet, especially used in music live streaming by the radio stations on Internet. It is specially for creating or listening to Internet audio broadcasts. Shoutcast allows us to broadcast a stream of music to the remote client connected to the server.
Once Shoutcast is in your server, you can use media players like Winamp or Mixxx to connect to a streaming server and broadcast audio playlists to the Internet.
This tutorial covers installation of Shoutcast on CentOS 8.
rkhunter (Rootkit Hunter) is is an open-source Unix/Linux based security monitoring and analyzing tool. It is a shell script which carries out various checks on the local system to try and detect known rootkits and malware.
rkhunter is a Unix-based tool that scans for rootkits, backdoors and possible local exploits. It does this by comparing SHA-1 hashes of important files with known good ones in online databases, searching for default directories (of rootkits), wrong permissions, hidden files, suspicious strings in kernel modules, and special tests for Linux and FreeBSD. rkhunter is notable due to its inclusion in popular OS (Fedora, Debian, etc.)
The tool has been written in Bourne shell, to allow for portability. It can run on almost all UNIX-derived systems.
This article will help you with the installation and config. rkhunter.
A compressed cache, or Zswap, sitting between your physical memory and your SWAP partition can yield benefits, whether you have a lot of RAM, or very little.
In the case of a low memory system, you risk running out, swap thrashing, and either lots of unnecessary writes to an SSD (which only have so many before they’re finished) or swapping out to a hard drive, which is terribly slow.
In the case of a large memory system, well, it’s still not a good idea to run without a SWAP partition, because your needs can always be bigger than the amount of RAM available.
The OOM-KILLER (or to a lesser extent EarlyOOM) is not your friend.
If you run out of memory and there is no swap available, the OOM-KILLER (or the iron fist in a velvet glove, EarlyOOM) fires up and starts KILLING (hence the name) things that it thinks will help keep the system up. On a desktop, this could be literally anything, although it’s always more likely to be something that’s using a ton of memory.
Icinga 2 is a free and open source monitoring tool designed to be scalable and extensible. Icinga 2 checks the availability of your network resources, notifies users of outages, and generates performance data for reporting. We can monitor large and complex environments across multiple locations using Icinga2.
We can also setup Icinga2 with high availability clusters with a distributed setup for large / complex environments.
In this guide we will learn how to install and configure Icinga 2 and Icinga Web 2 on CentOS 8.
Most GNU/Linux distributions put the /tmp folder (where all sorts of temporary files the OS needs to have around for a little while go, as the name implies) on a RAM drive, using tmpfs.
Debian, it appears, doesn’t. Having /tmp mounted on an SSD in a modern computer will cause many unnecessary writes to the SSD and will contribute to the drive wearing out too quickly.
I did some investigating and the Debian Wiki gives two ways to enable /tmp on a RAM drive.
You can either edit /etc/fstab by hand, but it’s easier to screw something up if you do, or you can just let systemd handle it. Since systemd has a service for this, why not just let it do that?
Open a terminal:
sudo cp /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/
sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount
After that, you can reboot and the OS should just clear the temp folder, come back up, and mount /tmp on tmpfs.
You can verify this with:
mount | grep /tmp
It should say something like:
tmpfs on /tmp type tmpfs (rw,nosuid,nodev,nr_inodes=409600)
I hate systemd.
God knows we’ve had much more trouble out of it than it was ever worth, and Debian should have known better than to bring it in. I would have much preferred Upstart.
In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Memcached on Debian 11. For those of you who didn’t know, Memcached, the high-performance, distributed memory object caching system, is extremely useful in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. This reduces the number of times an external data source must be read, which lowers overheads and speeds up response times. The memory caching software is a free, open-source project that anyone can use.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of Memcached on a Debian 11 (Bullseye).
↺ How to Disable Touchpad While Typing in Ubuntu (When Built-in Option Not Working) | UbuntuHandbook
While typing in my Ubuntu laptop, I was often making mistakes by tapping on touch-pad accidentally. The text cursor (aka caret) jumped to another place, and/or app window lost focus. It made me crazy since the built-in ‘disable touchpad while typing‘ option does not function in my HP laptop.
GNOME has the option to disable touchpad while typing, which is enabled out-of-the-box in current Ubuntu releases. Users may access the settings either via ‘/org/gnome/desktop/peripherals/touchpad/’ in Dconf Editor or using Gnome Tweaks tool.
We are back with our usual monthly update! Boiling Steam looks at the latest data dumps from ProtonDB to give you a quick list of new games that work (pretty much?) perfectly with Proton since September 2021 – all of them work out of the box or well enough with tweaks:
I remember being at the toy store as a kid, tugging on my Dad’s sleeve and begging him to get me a Hot Wheels set. Every quarter when I got my report card from school, I was that giddy child that always looked forward to seeing what my grades were. The better they were, the more money my Dad gave me to treat myself. Some kits were too expensive for him. Others he was willing to get, even though it might not have been as nice as the other.
I’d eagerly take that set of tracks home and, with the help of some of my older brothers, we put it together. I remember one track that I constructed that, even though it was simple in design, it had one of those accelerator things where the car starts. Once the toy car touched it, it would go flying with great speed, enough that it could go around an upside-down loop without falling. That car would loop around the track, hit the accelerator, and just keep going until the accelerator was turned off. It was fascinating to see that as a child.
There was another kit that I had, which I think was a car wash thingy? As well as some other kits that unfortunately have escaped my memory. Even without a track kit, getting the cars themselves were a blast; I’d take a few out to the back deck of the house and ride those along the railing with great enthusiasm. It’s kind of a shame that I never kept any of this stuff as I grew up. It would have been nice to relive the nostalgia.
Up until now, Kalendar has allowed you to view your events on a day-by-day basis through both the month view and the schedule view. This week, we are introducing the week view, which gives you a more detailed perspective of your incidences.
Another big new feature: we have reimplemented the KCommandBar in QML. What does this mean? Well, those of you who are power users will be able to leverage the same Command Bar you have enjoyed using in other KDE apps in Kalendar too.
Lastly, we have some improvements for the month view on mobile that should make it far better to view your incidences.
Flatpak is one standardized way for computer end-users to get applications on any GNU/Linux distro any version. With Flatpak there is Flathub, a central place on the internet where users can download applications in Flatpak format like LibreOffice, 0AD Strategy Game, and VLC Media Player. Now, there are several distros which included Flatpak out-of-the-box (called “Flatpak distro” here) so their users could simply click and install applications they want. This article is a simple, practical explanation of Flatpak for everyone especially computing beginners. Let’s dive in!
Simon Peter ( Simon by Peter ), the creator of the format of self-contained packages AppImage , published release distribution helloSystem 0.6 , based on FreeBSD 12.2 and positioned as a system for regular users, which may go macOS fans, unhappy with Apple policies. The system is free of the complications inherent in modern Linux distributions, is under complete user control and allows former macOS users to feel comfortable. To get acquainted with the distribution kit, a boot image of 1.4 GB in size ( torrent ) has been generated .
The interface resembles macOS and includes two panels – the top one with the global menu and the bottom one with the application bar. The panda-statusbar package developed by the CyberOS distribution kit (formerly PandaOS) is used to form the global menu and status bar . The Dock is based on the cyber-dock project , also from the CyberOS developers . For managing files and placing shortcuts on the desktop, the Filer file manager is being developed , based on pcmanfm-qt from the LXQt project. The default browser is Falkon , but Chromium is optionally available.
ZFS is used as the main file system, and exFAT, NTFS, EXT4, HFS +, XFS and MTP are supported for mounting. Applications are delivered in self-contained packages. To launch applications, the launch utility is used , which finds the program and analyzes errors during execution. The system for building Live images is based on the toolkit of the FuryBSD project .
A new release of FreeBSD-based helloSystem 0.6.0 is here with important updates and bug fixes. We round up the release in this post.
Halloween is coming, and what better way to celebrate the season than by using machine learning and a Raspberry Pi to accomplish something spooky! This year I’ve built a mannequin head that uses person detection and a simple servo motor to detect when a person is walking by and turn the head to follow them. I’m using a simple styrofoam mannequin head with some coloured in eyes from the dollar store, but you’re welcome to dress it up to fit your house’s theme or use a completely different kind of head or object. As long as you can use a servo to rotate it, the result is the same.
Globalscale Technologies has a follow-up to their low-cost ESPRESSOBin SBC based on Marvell Armada 3700LP SoC. The MochaBin-5G SBC is powered by a Marvell Armada 7040 quad-core Cortex-A72 processor, and offers 10GbE networking for as little as $159, with as well as optional WiFi 6 and 5G connectivity.
The single board computer is equipped with 16GB eMMC flash, up to 8GB DDR4, and plenty of high-speed interface with multiple Ethernet ports, USB 3.0 ports, M.2 socket for SATA and Cellular, and a mini PCIe for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.
Chinese telecommunications, data and cloud company Huawei also makes software.
Logically, its smartphones, tablets and other devices carry a degree of home-baked goods, with its Emotion User Interface (now known as just EMUI) forming the Android-based operating system that users would be perhaps most familiar with.
The company’s other self-developed OSs include HarmonyOS and MagucUI, all of which share elements of common DNA.
Huawei’s has now formally launched an updated version its openEuler operating system (OS), which has arrived in its latest expanded form this month.
ARC provides BigDIVA as a free service for searching open-access materials. Institutional subscriptions to BigDIVA are available and allow institutions to enable searches of open-access material along with proprietary databases to which they subscribe.
Three Indians have been awarded by the foundation that runs Wikipedia, for their contributions to its open-source platforms. One winner created a toolkit for Indian language scripts, another runs a virtual butterfly project, and a doctor has received honourable mention for busting myths about health.
Enough of us are looking at the cluster that I want an easy to read snapshot of the node state. So, I convert the csv output of the openstack command into a simple HTML table.
Yes, there are many other better ways to do this.
This one steps over the line for a simple tool. Ideally, it would just perform the csv to table part, with no style or HTML body. But, for my purposes, it makes it much easier to visualize if I get some formatting.
Some custom jq for RegEx selection of OpenStack Ironic baremetal nodes. Our Server types show up in their names. I want to be able to build lists of only the Mt. Jade Servers, which have names that look like this…
Supercapacitor technology often looks like a revolutionary energy storage technology on the surface, but the actual performance numbers can be rather uninspiring. However, for rapid and repeated charge and discharge cycles, supercaps are hard to beat. [Tom Stanton] wanted to see if supercaps have any practical use on e-bikes, and built a DIY electric motor in the process.
One of the problems with supercaps is the rapid voltage drop during discharge compared to batteries, which can limit the amount of usable energy. In an attempt to get around the voltage limitation, [Tom] built his own axial flux motor for the bike, using 3D printed formers for the coils and an aluminum rotor with embedded magnets. He expected torque to be severely limited, so he also machined a large sprocket for the rear wheel. He built a capacitor bank using six 2.7V 400F supercaps, only equivalent to the capacity of a single AA cell. Although it worked, the total range was only around 100 m at low speed. When he hooked the motor up to a conventional battery, he did find that it was quite usable, if a bit underpowered.
In response to a whistleblower complaint alleging corruption within the EPA’s New Chemicals Division, agency officials immediately notified those accused of misconduct.
Global cases of coronavirus disease 2019 (covid-19) continue to rise. As of 14 September 2021, more than 225 million people have been infected with severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus virus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), and total deaths have surpassed 4.6 million
One of the great virtues of open-source software – which is that anyone can contribute – is also one of its greatest weaknesses.
The issue is that supply-chainlike process by which projects involving multiple contributors come together is based to a large degree on faith that no one will introduce malicious code or backdoors that sabotage a project.
As open source has increasingly worked its way into commercial and enterprise applications, however, some people see the reliance on trust as a vulnerability. Kim Lewandowski and Dan Lorenc of Google LLC’s open-source security team recently noted that the process of installing most open-source software today “is equivalent to picking up a random thumb-drive off the sidewalk and plugging it into your machine.”
Furthering its mission to provide industry leading open source solutions to transform networking, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF) today announced the launch of Ananki™, an independent venture-backed company to deliver open source-based Software-Defined Private 5G as a commercial service to address enterprises’ unique requirements of Industry 4.0.
Google introduced the Secure Open Source (SOS) initiative, which will provide bonuses for work related to hardening critical open source software. A million dollars have been allocated for the first payments, but if the initiative is recognized as successful, the investment in the project will continue.
As part of Google’s recently announced $10 billion commitment to cybersecurity defense, the company announced Friday the sponsorship for the Secure Open Source (SOS) Rewards pilot program run by the Linux Foundation.
With the widespread adoption of cloud and container infrastructure, protecting servers, services, containers and virtual machines exposed on the Internet with a reliable, intelligent intrusion prevention system is more important than ever. Cloud-native environments foster rapid growth and innovation, but also introduce an element of added complexity, along with new security challenges.
Recently, LinuxSecurity researchers had the opportunity to speak with CrowdSec CEO Philippe Humeau about modern cyber risk, CrowdSec’s unique and advantageous community-powered approach to intrusion prevention with an extremely accurate IP reputation system, what users can expect from the latest CrowdSec release, what the future holds for CrowdSec, and more! We’re excited to share key insights and highlights from this exclusive interview with our readers to help them better understand the modern cyber threat landscape and how they can bolster their intrusion prevention strategy to prevent attacks.
There are times, when keeping your system up-to date does not help you against vulnerabilities. During these times, you want to have your servers and applications hardened as good as possible – including good Apparmor profiles. But even then, something bad can easily happen – and it’s very good to see that others take care. Especially if these others are professionals, that take care for you, even if you did not ask them directly.
Tuesday, 2021-08-31, was such a day for our openSUSE infrastructure status page: SonarSource reported to us a pre-auth remote code execution at the https://status.opensuse.org/api/v1/incidents endpoint.
SonarSource, equally driven by studying and understanding real-world vulnerabilities, is trying to help the open-source community to secure their projects. They disclosed vulnerabilities in the open-source status page software Cachet – and informed us directly – that our running version is vulnerable to CVE-2021-39165. Turned out that the Cachet upstream project is meanwhile seen as dead – at least it went out of support by their original maintainers since a while. It went into this unsupported state unnoticed by us – and potentially also unnoticed by many others. A problem, that many other, dead open source projects sadly share.
Pointing out that far from cleaning up voter rolls, like the Election Commission has claimed, the move will create mass disenfranchisement and increase voter fraud, the signatories have called on the EC to withdraw the proposal.
At first glance, JB, an artist based in Los Angeles, perhaps doesn’t look much like the picture on their driver’s license. For one thing, the ID photo is from a few years ago. Hair that was once long and dark is now buzzed and bleached. And there’s the fact that JB is transgender and has been taking testosterone for over two years, which has led to changing facial features, thicker eyebrows, and acne that wasn’t there before. (They asked to be identified only by their first initials because of privacy concerns.)
Howie Hawkins, the Green Party’s 2020 presidential candidate, blasted Democrats today for accepting token climate measures in the shrinking Build Back Better reconciliation bill.
“Biden’s original climate proposals in his $2.3 trillion American Jobs Plan last March were inadequate to begin with. Only about $100 billion a year in that proposal were climate- and energy-related spending. Its policies included counter-productive measures like further natural gas development,” said Hawkins who made a detailed critique of the plan’s climate provisions at the time.
“As the Democrats keep cutting the Build Back Better reconciliation bill, they are surrendering to climate collapse as the global climate summit prepares to convene in Glasgow at the end of this month. The climate movement needs to recognize this reality and demand an emergency Green New Deal to really deal with this existential crisis,” Hawkins said.
President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Friday that Democrats should accept a bill that spends around $2 trillion, which is down from the 10-year $3.5 trillion budget blueprint that Congress agreed to in August. The $3.5 trillion plan was itself down from the $6.1 trillion that Biden had proposed in the spring in his American Jobs Plan for physical infrastructure, including climate measures, and his American Families Plan to expand the social safety net.
Whitney is joined by James Corbett of the Corbett Report to discuss the overlap between the oligarchs of China and the United States and how the rise of China is intimately tied to Wall Street and Globalism. Published on 09/28/21.
Unified Consulting’s Craig Thompson has written an article covering the potential risks and uncertainty around the adoption of Versatile Video Coding (VVC). VVC is entering a competitive codec market where its future will depend more on royalty demands than on its technical specifications. As is detailed in an VVC economic report recently published by Unified Patents and authored by Charles River Associates, VVC is faced with strong competition from MPEG’s new Essential Video Codec (EVC), and existing HEVC, AVC as well as from Alliance for Open Media’s Advance Video 1 codec (AV1). The royalty pricing pressure on VVC is exerted, first, by MPEG-LA’s AVC pool, which is viewed by courts in the United States and in Europe as being a fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory (FRAND) rate, and, second, by AV1 and EVC, which have been developed specifically to incur less if any royalties.
VVC’s plight stems from its predecessor High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and the excessive royalties and licensing uncertainties that have stymied HEVC’s adoption since its launch in 2013. As shown below, the formation of 3 competing pools to extract royalties from HEVC has led to licensing inefficiencies and royalty stacking that has increased licensing costs for HEVC to be 9-12 times higher than AVC. If this is repeated, VVC’s adoption could be in jeopardy.
In-house and private practice lawyers say Leahy’s attempt to strengthen the PTAB will probably succeed, but it is unclear whether all of his reforms will pass
↺ Healthcare wearables – 5 useful things to know about patenting their use (part 1: diagnostic uses)
In recent years there has been an explosion in the field of healthcare wearables; high-tech devices now range from patches, rings, watches and scarfs to insoles, headbands, contact lenses and glasses. Their functionality encompasses everything from counting steps to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease, tracking fertility to delivering wound sealant in the event of trauma. The wearable medical device market is expected to reach over US $47,000 million by 2026 and the current COVID crisis has only driven innovation in this area1.
Milan may be the frontrunner, but some lawyers fear politicians’ lack of interest in IP could put the bid at risk
Aptahem AB (publ) announces today that the Turkish patent office has approved the patent application as the first validated country in Europe. The patent was published with the patent number TR2021/013877 T4.
On 30 July 2021, the Federal Court of Australia held that an artificial intelligence (AI) system could be validly named on a patent application. In a historic decision (Thaler v Commissioner of Patents [2021] FCA 879) of the Australian Federal Court, Beach J delivered a judgement that the owner of the AI system can derive title to the invention from a non-human i.e. an AI inventor.
Patents play a crucial role in protecting innovation in the life sciences sector and are often essential to attracting investment and funding for new medicines and treatments. However, despite rigorous examination and opposition procedures at patent office level, a large number of invalid patents make it onto patent registers in Europe and worldwide. Estimates differ widely, but some suggest that up to 60% of granted patents are invalid. So the risk of invalidity cannot be disregarded by parties entering into patent licensing and other patent-heavy commercial arrangements.
On September 28, 2021, Unified filed an amicus curiae brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit in support of a mandamus petition related to what it views as systemic delays in decisions on venue in patent-heavy District Court dockets, and how they are frustrating the Congressional intent of the America Invents Act. The writ, In re: Netflix, was filed by Mark Lemley of Durie Tangri.
The House Judiciary Committee has voted in favor of H.R. 2891, the Preserve Access to Affordable Generics and Biosimilars Act. The Bill was also referred to the House Energy & Commerce Committee and so may have a few more hurdles before it moves to the House Floor.
We are delighted to announce the release of the 2021 edition of Managing IP’s Rising Stars publication.
Sen. Leahy and Sen. Cornyn have introduced the “Restoring the America Invents Act” designed to further address problems caused by the USPTO’s issuance of “poor-quality patents.”
[...]
Attempting to Eliminate Outside Influence on Panels from Within the USPTO: “EX PARTE COMMUNICATION.—An officer who has review authority, supervisory authority, or disciplinary authority with respect to an administrative patent judge of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (or a delegate of such an officer), and who is not a member of a panel … shall refrain from ex parte communication with such a judge who is a member of that panel concerning any pending matter before that panel, except as allowed under the Code of Conduct for United States Judges.”
The UK Intellectual Property Office (UK IPO) has recently launched ‘IP Access’, a new funding scheme for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The scheme offers a contribution of £5,000 for eligible SMEs in the UK that have ambitions to grow, to help them recover from and overcome COVID-related challenges and to encourage them to invest in their IP.
The grant can be used as a contribution towards many IP related costs including the management of IP assets, consultancy, IP insurance and valuation and tax relief advice, as well as fees for IP advisers.
On September 10, 2021, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit denied mandamus in In re OnePlus Tech. (Shenzhen) Co., confirming that the plaintiff may bypass Article 5 of the Hague Convention on the Service of Process and serve the Chinese defendant through alternative service to attorneys located in California who had represented the defendant in the past. Commentators heralded the decision as an important improvement in the enforcement of patent rights against foreign, and in particular Chinese, defendants (Law360). However, in many IP cases involving foreign defendants, this sense of victory might be premature.
What ultimately matters is whether a judgment resulting from a U.S. dispute is enforceable—either in the United States or abroad. If a foreign defendant has assets in the United States and a U.S. judgment can be enforced in the United States, bypassing The Hague Convention does not matter. But if a foreign defendant has no assets in the United States and a plaintiff must seek enforcement of a U.S. judgment abroad, bypassing the Convention—even if the end run is sanctioned by a U.S. court and is legal under U.S. law—might be for naught. Once a plaintiff requests recognition and enforcement of a U.S. judgment abroad, a foreign court may deny recognition and enforcement of the judgment if a defendant was not served in accordance with The Hague Convention. Avoiding recognition and enforcement abroad is not always possible; the August 2021 decision in Next Investments, LLC v. Bank of China shows that seizing a defendant’s foreign accounts by using the U.S. branches of Chinese banks might not work.
Germany has completed ratification of the Protocol on Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement.
The Federal Ministry of Justice confirmed on Monday, September 27, that the country had deposited its instrument of ratification, leaving just two more nations to complete ratification before the provisional application period (PAP) can begin.
Slovenia and Austria have already confirmed they will deposit before the end of the year.
Germany’s participation had been in doubt until June this year, when the country’s Federal Court of Justice dismissed a constitutional challenge to the agreement.
Without Germany, the project could not have gone ahead. Now, however, the UPC Preparatory Committee predicts the court will become operational by mid-2022.
There is a significant amount of work to be done before that deadline. Once two more countries have ratified the protocol, the final stage of preparations, or the PAP, will begin.
This period will be used to recruit judges and finalise the bespoke IT system for the court. There is also the question of which city will host the central division seat vacated by London.
Milan has been considered the front-runner, although Amsterdam is in contention as well. Managing IP has reported on differing views among the Italian IP sector on whether there is enough political will in Italy to secure Milan’s candidacy.
Separately, today, September 30, the Irish Business and Employers Confederation urged the Irish government to advance Dublin as a candidate for the seat.
It remains to be seen whether these issues can be resolved by next summer, but Germany’s ratification of the PAP protocol at least brings the project one step closer to completion.
With working patterns changed for good, attorneys say careful planning and picking when to check email can help them find the ideal balance
In the Order of 19 July 2021 (ECLI:ES:JMB:2021:2692A) Commercial Court No. 1 of Barcelona dismissed a preliminary injunction request by BAYER
Inventions generally refer to products or processes involving an inventive step and having industrial application. Such novel creations are recognized and protected under patent laws. A patent entitles the holder to certain exclusive rights over his invention for a prescribed period of time, generating economic rewards.
Such protection is founded on the rationale that allowing an inventor to reap the benefits of his creation will incentivize innovation and will also prevent people from obtaining undue benefits from the invention (subject to fair and unreasonable terms).
Altria Group Inc. and Philip Morris International Inc. must halt imports and sales of their IQOS heated tobacco device, the U.S. International Trade Commission ruled Wednesday in a patent case brought by rival R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co.
The case now moves to administrative review, which is expected to last two months; the decision must be signed by President Biden before it takes effect. PMI said it plans to appeal the ruling.
At the meeting, the Slovenian Presidency also highlighted the situation regarding the Unified Patent Court, as given the progress made in the last year and considering that Germany and Slovenia have completed the procedures, we are only one step away from the entry into force of the preparatory procedures for the operation of the Court. The ratification of the Protocol on the Provisional Application of the Unified Patent Court Agreement by just one more member state is needed to make the unitary patent operational.
On October 1, 2021, Unified filed a petition for inter partes review (IPR) against U.S. Patent 8,953,816, owned by MicroParing Technologies LLC, an NPE. The ’816 patent is currently being asserted against Toyota and GM and is directed to connecting wireless audio devices to in-vehicle audio systems.
A wide-ranging Q&A guide to trademark registration and use in Germany, including key legal and practical considerations.
Can R&D activities amount to genuine use of a trade mark in the course of trade? This question was considered recently in the decision in Singapore of Baidu Europe B.V. v Baidu Online Network Technology (Beijing) Co., Ltd. [2021] SGIPOS 8.
Here, the Intellectual Property Office of Singapore (“IPOS”) found that, even absent any evidence of actual sales, R&D activities and collaborative projects by a mark proprietor can amount to genuine use of the mark in the course of trade. IPOS also reiterated that the objective of a partial revocation is to obtain a “fair specification” that provides the mark proprietor with a commercially sensible zone of exclusivity.
An unregistered community design is established merely by the disclosure of a design and triggers protection for three years from the date of disclosure. This informal right was created to satisfy the demands of the industry and creatives for a design protection right providing broad-ranging territorial protection and safety for short-lived products without an elaborate and costly registration procedure.
Our Legal Insight delves into the particularities of the unregistered community design and its relationship to its big brother – the registered community design. We take a closer look at the uncertainties, but also consider how the designer can utilise this informal right.
Rospatent’s speedy registration of a term linked to Alexei Navalny and its immediate enforcement in court has sparked controversy among counsel
Mistakes happen. We all make them; it’s part of what makes us human. But what happens when the EUIPO makes a mistake?
As background to a (lengthy) case leading to interesting decision of the General Court, the EUIPO’s department responsible for the trade mark register erroneously rectified the registration of Veuve Cliquot’s iconic orange mark as “another mark” or a “colour mark”, in lieu of a figurative mark.
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In 2000, the EUIPO Examiner dismissed the application on the ground that it was devoid of distinctive character within the meaning of what is now Article 7(1)(b) of the EU Trade Mark Regulation (EUTMR). The examiner stated that the trade mark was not a colour mark per se but rather a figurative mark in colour. If the subject of the application was a colour, it would follow that the box ‘other’ should be ticked on the application form instead of the ‘figurative mark’ box.
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It is a fact that colour marks are devoid of any shape whereas figurative marks have a clearly defined contour. The difference between the two types of marks influences consumer perception and affects the assessment of the distinctive character of a mark.
Notwithstanding the EUIPO’s error in this particular case, the broader teaching is that the choice of the nature of a mark is a matter for the applicant: choosing one classification in lieu of another is usually not regarded as a manifest error, since a contested mark could be considered, according to its depiction, as a figurative mark claiming even if it is a specific colour.
This said, the choice eventually made has a decisive impact on the assessment of registrability and validity of the mark at issue. This is also why it is very important for potential applicants to carefully consider which heading their trade mark should fall under.
It is the end of September and normally the city of Munich would be crowded with tourists from all over the world to celebrate the Oktoberfest, Wiesn or, as the citizens of Munich also call it, the “fifth season”. Unfortunately, this event – which first took place in 1810 – has been cancelled again due to covid-19. Yet this still provides an opportunity to take a fresh look at the festival from a trademark point of view.
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More recently, another trademark application in the name of the Landeshauptstadt Munich was registered with the EUIPO, namely EU trademark 015535008 for OKTOBERFEST. After year-long proceedings, not only due to an initial refusal raised by the examiner but also due to numerous third-party observations, the Board of Appeal (Appeal R 1840/2019-4) finally issued its decision on the matter, ruling that the mark is to be considered descriptive for goods and services that have to do with festivals. However, no descriptiveness objection applies for such goods and services that fall under the notion of souvenir and merchandising articles. Thus, the mark was registered on 31 August 2021 for a variety of goods and services in Classes 3, 4, 6, 9, 14, 16, 18, 21, 24, 25, 26, 28, 31, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43 and 45 but not Classes 29, 30, 32, 33 and 41.
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