● 11.21.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

● Links 21/11/2021: Q4OS 4.7 Gemini and Second Linux RC

Posted in News Roundup at 6:04 pm by Dr. Roy SchestowitzContentsGNU/LinuxDistributionsDevices/EmbeddedFree Software/Open SourceLeftovers

GNU/Linux

=> ↺ Linux Weekly Roundup #157

• Welcome to this week’s Linux Weekly Roundup. We had another peaceful week in the world of Linux releases with Slackware 15.0-rc2, CentOS 8.5.2111, and Rocky Linux 8.5 as the main ones.

Kernel Space

=> ↺ Linux Kernel 5.14 Reached End of Life, Users Urged to Upgrade to Linux 5.15 LTS

• Linux kernel 5.14 was released almost three months ago, on August 30th, 2021, in celebration of Linux’s 30th anniversary, and it introduced quite some interesting features, starting with better protection against those pesky Spectre vulnerabilities and continuing with much-enhanced support for AMD GPUs.

• Today, November 21st, renowned Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman announced the release of Linux kernel 5.14.21 as the twenty-first maintenance update and also the last in the series. Yes, that’s right, Linux 5.14 is now marked as EOL (End of Life) on the kernel.org website and it will no longer be supported.

=> ↺ Linux Random Number Generator

=> ↺ New Linux /dev/random RNG Revved For The 43rd Time – Phoronix

• Going on for more than a half-decade now has been the effort around Linux Random Number Generator as a new /dev/random implementation for Linux. After more than five years, LRNG continues to work towards being mainlined and today marks the 43rd revision to these patches.

• LRNG continues baking as a “production ready” implementation of /dev/random that follows different design changes from the existing kernel implementation. It is though a drop-in replacement with the same API/ABI.

=> ↺ Linux 5.16-rc2

=> ↺ Linux 5.16-rc2 Released – “Felt Pretty Normal” – Phoronix

• Linus Torvalds just issued the second release candidate of Linux 5.16 following the closure of the merge window last Sunday.

• Overall, Linux 5.16-rc2 is rather uneventful. No big scary pull requests arrived this week nor anything else to worrisome… There is the situation of the cluster-aware scheduling hurting Alder Lake but that is being worked on and looks like it will be disabled or so in time for the Linux 5.16 stable release around the start of the new year.

Applications

=> ↺ Is ‘jrnl’ the Best Journaling App for the Command Line? – OMG! Ubuntu!

• Want to log your thoughts and memories without leaving the command line?

• Well, you can do so using jrnl. As its vowel-less moniker ably conveys, it is journaling app, albeit one with a big difference: it’s designed to be used from a terminal, not a web browser or graphical interface

• A reader recently mailed in to tell me about — thanks Peter; tips and prods like this are always appreciated! — and while I know journaling isn’t the most thrilling topic (I don’t keep a journal myself) I still wanted to wrote about it.

=> ↺ Modern Free Markdown Editor Ghostwriter 2.1.0 Released with New Features | UbuntuHandbook

• Ghostwriter, free and open-source markdown text editor, released version 2.1.0 with some new features. Here’s what’s new and how to install in Ubuntu.

• Ghostwriter is a cross-platform, aesthetic and distraction-free Markdown editor works on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. It comes with live HTML preview, dark and light mode, focus mode, hemingway mode, autosave, MathJax, and built-in Cheat Sheet in the sidebar (toggle via F1) in case you forgot some Markdown syntax.

Instructionals/Technical

=> ↺ How to install Blender on Elementary OS 6.0 – Invidious

• In this video, we are looking at how to install Blender on Elementary OS 6.0.

=> ↺ How to install MetaTrader 4 with the EagleFX Broker on a Chromebook

• Today we are looking at how to install MetaTrader 4 with the EagleFX Broker 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.

=> ↺ Install Gnome Vanilla on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS focal fossa – Linux Shout

• Gnome is a desktop environment for graphical user interfaces of Unix systems. Here we learn the steps to install Gnome Vanilla on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS Focal Fossa Linux.

• Gnome comprises program packages for the user interface or GUI itself and for data processing that is often used and controlled directly from windows. The Gnome developers aim to create an open-source interface that is easy to use for as many users as possible.

=> ↺ How To Stream Xbox Cloud Gaming with Raspberry Pi | Tom’s Hardware

• With current generation consoles still being hard to come by, even a year after launch, game streaming services have become quite popular. For a few dollars per month we can stream a curated library of games to our laptops, desktops and mobile devices.

=> ↺ How to Install Teampass Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS – idroot

• In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Teampass Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS. For those of you who didn’t know, TeamPass is an open-source password manager that helps you to store and manage all your passwords from the central location. It is a collaborative password manager that allows you to share all stored passwords with team members. TeamPass uses MySQL/MariaDB to store passwords and provides a powerful tool for customizing passwords access Teampass is highly customizable and provides a lot of options to customize it to your needs. It uses Defuse PHP Encryption library to secure your data and your users.

• 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 Teampass Password Manager on Ubuntu 20.04 (Focal Fossa). You can follow the same instructions for Ubuntu 18.04, 16.04, and any other Debian-based distribution like Linux Mint.

=> ↺ How to Copy, Move and Rename Files in Linux (Step-by-Step Guide) – DekiSoft

• There is much more to copying and renaming files on Linux rather than cp and mv. Try out some commands and strategies to save your time.

• For this purpose, users have been using cp and mv for decades. These were some of the few commands we learned and use every day, similarly, there are other techniques, handy variations, and other commands used for this purpose that provide unique options.

=> ↺ mbsync vs OfflineIMAP – anarcat

• After recovering from my latest email crash (previously, previously), I had to figure out which tool I should be using. I had many options but I figured I would start with a popular one (mbsync).

• But I also evaluated OfflineIMAP which was resurrected from the Python 2 apocalypse, and because I had used it before, for a long time.

=> ↺ The last syncmaildir crash – anarcat

• My syncmaildir (SMD) setup failed me one too many times (previously, previously). In an attempt to migrate to an alternative mail synchronization tool, I looked into using my IMAP server again, and found out my mail spool was in a pretty bad shape. I’m comparing mbsync and offlineimap in the next post but this post talks about how I recovered the mail spool so that tools like those could correctly synchronise the mail spool again.

=> ↺ Hetzner Pulumi Intro

=> ↺ My desktop – November 2021 | Hund

• I decided it was time for a new “my desktop” post. It’s actually been one year since my latest post, simply because my desktop doesn’t see that many changes these days. Which I assume is a good thing? Anyway. I think there’s been just enough changes the past year to make it worth making a new post now.

=> ↺ More To Environment Variables Than You Know – Invidious

• Sometimes I get weird comments on my channel about features that I never even knew existed and this is one of those times

Wine or Emulation

=> ↺ Box64 Can Now Run Crysis on ARM with DXVK

• You can also expect to have Risc-V supported by Box64 in the future… Needless to say, it won’t be too long (give it a few years) until the ARM revolution comes to Linux PCs as well, bringing gaming along with it.

Games

=> ↺ Best Free Android Apps: OpenTTD – transport tycoon business simulation game

• OpenTTD is a reimplementation of the Microprose game “Transport Tycoon Deluxe” with lots of new features and enhancements. The first Transport Tycoon (TT) game was released in 1994, with the release of Transport Tycoon Deluxe (TTD) following the next year.

• You play the role of president of a start-up transport company in 1950, building railway, road, air and maritime transportation systems for commodities and people. The goal of the game is to outsmart your competition and become the game’s highest-ranking transport company by the year 2050.

• There are many tools available to build transport routes, including ability to fully modify the landscape. Each town has a Local Authority which tries to prevent the player from excessive terraforming.

Desktop Environments/WMs

K Desktop Environment/KDE SC/Qt

=> ↺ Porting Tok To Not Linux: The Journey Of Incessant Failure

• Craft seems like the no-brainer for a KDE project to use, considering it’s in-house and supports all of KDE’s frameworks and has packaging capabilities. Unfortunately, what sounds good on paper does not translate to what’s good in execution.

• When I first checked it out, the current version being shipped had incorrect code that would have failed to compile had it been a compiled language instead of Python. Heck, even running a typechecker for Python would have revealed the fact that the code was trying to call a function that didn’t exist. Yet, this managed to get shipped. Not a good first impression.

• After manually patching in the function into existence on my system, I ran into another hurdle: Craft’s env script is broken; mangling PATH to an extent where entries like /usr/bin and /bin and other things got just truncated into oblivion, resulting in a shell where you couldn’t do much of anything.

• After manually patching PATH to be not mangled, I ran into another and the final hurdle before I gave up: Craft tried to use half bundled libraries and tools and half system libraries and tools, resulting in dynamic linker errors from system tools not finding symbols they needed from bundled libraries.

• When I brought these issues up in the Craft chat, the answers basically amounted to a lack of care and “go use Ubuntu.” Not acceptable for Tok considering most of the people interested in building Tok like this don’t use Ubuntu, and honestly doesn’t make you have much faith in a system for porting utilities to other platforms if said system doesn’t even work across the distributions of one platform.

Distributions

New Releases

=> ↺ Q4OS 4.7 Gemini, stable

• A significant update to the fourth Q4OS stable series codenamed ‘Gemini’ has been released. This upgrade includes set of security and bug fixes, receives the most recent Debian Bullseye 11.1. as well as Trinity desktop environment R14.0.11 stable versions. Trinity desktop maintenance release of the R14 series is intended to bring bug fixes, while preserving overall stability. You can find the complete Trinity desktop release notes and new features list at the Trinity desktop environment website.

• We are currently pushing all the changes mentioned above into the Q4OS repositories, automatic update process will take care about to update computers for current users.

EasyOS

=> ↺ redshift GUI tray app

• EasyOS has a GUI for /usr/bin/sct (set color temperature), ‘brightness-control-1.2.2.pet’.

=> ↺ XorgWizard fixed for Radeon card

• …I mentioned that it has fans all over the place — there is also one on the side-panel, not shown in photo. The guy who sold it to me had configured it as a gaming machine, and it had a Radeon Bart XT PowerColor HD6870 card, with 1GB RAM, two DVI-I sockets and one hdmi socket. Soon after acquiring the PC, I took the card out and only used the on-board Intel video. Moved house a few times over the years, and that card got lost. Until now, found it in my car, under a seat. So, it is now back in the PC, and it works fine.

Debian Family

=> ↺ Julian Andres Klode: APT Z3 Solver Basics

• Z3 is a theorem prover developed at Microsoft research and available as a dynamically linked C++ library in Debian-based distributions. While the library is a whopping 16 MB, and the solver is a tad slow, it’s permissive licensing, and number of tactics offered give it a huge potential for use in solving dependencies in a wide variety of applications.

• Z3 does not need normalized formulas, but offers higher level abstractions like atmost and atleast and implies, that we will make use of together with boolean variables to translate the dependency problem to a form Z3 understands.

• In this post, we’ll see how we can apply Z3 to the dependency resolution in APT. We’ll only discuss the basics here, a future post will explore optimization criteria and recommends.

Devices/Embedded

Open Hardware/Modding

=> ↺ Calling all Raspberry Pi camera users

• Our big Raspberry Pi OS update last week has a significant, albeit temporary, impact on people who use cameras in their Raspberry Pi projects. Head to the lead story in this issue to find out everything you need to know to keep your projects working and decide whether to upgrade to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye yet.

Mobile Systems/Mobile Applications

=> ↺ You Can Now Install Android TV Apps using Your Smartphones | Beebom

=> ↺ Google is making it easier for Android users to text their iPhone friends — here’s how | Tom’s Guide

=> ↺ How to use the expanded screenshot feature in Android 12 – Information News

=> ↺ Samsung brings Android 12 privacy to Galaxy S21 series

=> ↺ The Best RTS Games for Android – Company of Heroes, Rome: Total War, Redsun and More – Droid Gamers

=> ↺ 11 new (and 1 WTF) Android games from the last week: The best, worst, and everything in between (11/14/21 -11/21/21)

=> ↺ Onyx Boox Nova Air review: Kindle ain’t got nothing on this Android e-reader

Free, Libre, and Open Source Software

=> ↺ A big hey! from diaspora*

• You might have been wondering what happened to diaspora*. Well, although we’ve been a bit quiet, we haven’t gone away! In fact, some big things have been happening in the background that we’re really excited about, and now it’s come to the time for us to tell you about them.

• [...]

• One of the key features of a decentralized social network has to be the ability to move your account data from one node (we call them ‘pods’) to another. This has proved to be one of the most difficult things to accomplish properly, and consequently it has taken a long time! The back-end code to do all the hard work was completed by Senya in a mammoth effort, and what remains is to create a ‘front-end’ interface so that it’s easy for anyone to access the feature via the account settings page. This is currently being worked on by new member Thorsten Claus with support from core team members Flaburgan and Benjamin Neff. It is currently being reviewed and tested, and once this has been done we’ll be able to merge it.

FSF

Licensing/Legal

=> ↺ Software License Agreements In Ukraine

Leftovers

=> ↺ Taking The Bark Out Of Reverb With Wood Scraps | Hackaday

• For the past few years, many have become used to having virtual meetings in their homes. Spaces like kitchen tables, couches, spare bedrooms, and hammocks in the yard have all become “offices”. As you can imagine, many of these spaces aren’t well known for their acoustic qualities. [Zac] built a sound diffusion art piece out of scrap pieces of wood to help his office sound better when recording.

• Reverb is caused by sound bouncing off hard, flat surfaces like drywall. These reflections are picked up by the microphone and lead to a noticeable drop in perceived sound quality. There are generally two ways to kill reverb in a space: diffusion and absorption. Diffusion is the technique that [Zac] is going for, with thousands of faces at different angles and locations, it breaks up the harsh reflections into millions of tiny reflections. Absorption is usually accomplished with foam and other typically soft substances.

• [Zac] happened to have a large pile of offcuts and extra material from past projects of various wood species, making it easy to make a visually interesting piece. He used a table saw to rip them to a consistent width and a drum sander reduced them all to the same depth. Next, the long sticks were cut with a miter saw into 5 different lengths, leaving him with thousands of little pieces of wood. The hard part began when he had to glue several thousand pieces to a plywood backer board with CA glue. Sanding, finishing with poly, and a french cleat made the three pieces ready to hang on the wall.

Science

=> ↺ Magic in VR That Depends On Your Actual State of Mind

• [Cangar]’s excitement is palpable in his release of a working brain-computer interface (BCI) mod for Skyrim VR, in which the magic system in the game is modified so that spell effectiveness is significantly boosted when the player is in a focused mental state. [Cangar] isn’t just messing around, either. He’s a neuroscientist whose research focuses on assessing mental states during task performance. Luckily for us, he’s also an enthusiastic VR gamer, and this project of his has several interesting aspects that he’s happy to show off in a couple of videos.

Hardware

=> ↺ PSSST! Here’s A Novel SSB Radio Design With Only Seven Transistors | Hackaday

• When [Pete Juliano] sat down to design a sideband transceiver for the 20 Meter (14 MHz) ham radio band, he eschewed the popular circuits that make up so many designs. He forged ahead, building a novel design that he calls Pete’s Simple Seven SSB Transceiver, or PSSST for short.

• What makes the PSSST so simple is not only its construction, but the low component count. The same circuit using four 2N2222A’s is used on both transmit and receive. On transmit, an extra three components step in to amplify the microphone input and build output power, which is 2.5-4 Watts, depending on the final output transistor used. The best part is that all of the transistors can be had for under $10 USD! [Pete] shows where radio components such as the RF mixers and the crystal filter can be purchased, saving a new constructor a lot of headaches. The VFO and IF frequencies are both provided by the venerable si5351a with an Arduino at the helm.

=> ↺ A Trackball So Good You Can’t Buy It | Hackaday

• Inside are a pair of PMW3360 optical sensors on PCBs mounted with a view into the billiard ball sockets, and for which the brains come courtesy of an RP2040 microcontroller. There are five PCBs in all, each having a set of purpose-built stand-offs to hold it. The result appears to be about as good a trackball as you’d hope to buy, except of course that you can’t. All the files to make your own are in the GitHub repository though, so all is not lost.

=> ↺ Light-Tracking BEAM Robot Can See The Light | Hackaday

• BEAM robotics, which stands for Biology, Electronics, Aesthetics, and Mechanics, is an ethos that focuses on building robots with simple analog circuits. [NanoRobotGeek] built a great example of the form, creating a light-tracking robot that uses no batteries and no microcontrollers.

Integrity/Availability

Proprietary

=> ↺ Move over Windows, Linux apps can now stream to AWS AppStream 2.0

Security

Privacy/Surveillance

=> ↺ Privacy Startup Nym Technology Raises $13 Million in Series A Funding Round Led by Andreessen Horowitz

• It has already recruited former U.S. Army intelligence analyst and whistleblower Chelsea Manning, who leaked thousands of classified documents using the privacy software Tor.

• [...]

• The three-year-old Switzerland-based company uses mixnet, where node operators are rewarded with tokens to mix internet traffic and make it harder for adversaries to get information at the highest level, including nation-state level mass surveillance like NSA.

• Nym also offers privacy credential services to allow users to only allow access to part of their activity when required without revealing their identity.

• Currently operating in test mode, Nym has about 5,000 nodes and 30 validators, with plans to go live at full capacity by the end of this year.

• Just last week, the team released a desktop wallet for node operators to pledge their tokens to join the Nym network. In return, they earn more tokens based on their amount and quality of work in mixing the internet traffic. It ensures the quality of services while incentivizing miners for work well done.

=> ↺ PSA: Turn off email tracking — here’s how

• Email tracking is the process of tracking sent emails and monitoring the recipient’s activity with them. Often used via your inbox or browser extensions, the tracking software adds a small .GIF or .PNG file in the form of a 1×1 pixel into an email or HTML code of a website. This “spy pixel,” as messaging service Hey puts it, can be found in the header, footer or body of an email. They are impossible to see with the naked eye, meaning anyone can use email tracking without you even batting an eyelid.

Environment

=> ↺ In-house: eco-conscious brands must be wary of ‘greenwashing’

=> ↺ makes you a laughing stock, subject of ridicule

• Sources say brands can imply green credentials in their marks and that IP owners could consider hiring scientific experts to verify product claims before launch

Finance

=> ↺ Amazon Will Face Black Friday Strikes and Protests in 20 Countries

• On Black Friday, a group of unions and grassroots organizations, known as the Make Amazon Pay Coalition, will stage coordinated protests and strikes in at least 20 countries to demand Amazon pay workers a living wage, respect their right to join unions, pay its fair share of taxes, and commit to meaningful environmental sustainability.

• Planned actions include: a massive Amazon delivery driver strike in Italy; a work stoppage across Amazon warehouses in France; demonstrations at the construction site of new Amazon regional offices in South Africa; garment worker protests across Bangladesh and Cambodia.

• In the United States, the Athena Coalition will be holding digital and in-person #MakeAmazonPay actions targeting Whole Foods and Amazon, a town hall about the future of worker organizing in California, and a worker panel in Illinois on supply chain disruptions.

Censorship/Free Speech

=> ↺ EU’s Vestager Says Harmful Content ‘Has Role to Play’ in Debate

• The European Union’s antitrust chief said the bloc’s upcoming digital rules are being designed to protect freedom of speech on platforms like Facebook while targeting harmful online content.

Monopolies

Patents

=> ↺ Five ways in which the Leahy-Cornyn bill dramatically changes the PTAB process

=> ↺ Leahy’s last move before retiring

• The Restoring the America Invents Act will hurt patent owners and ensure that challengers who want PTAB will review will get just that

=> ↺ DABUS Team Seeks Permission For Further Appeal

• As previously reported, the UK Court of Appeal rejected an attempt to name a computer system (DABUS) as an inventor on a UK patent application. As suggested in that report, and unsurprisingly given the widespread attempts by the DABUS team to gain acceptance of computer inventors (and indeed the hype that they have sought to generate around these cases), we understand that the applicants have now applied to the Supreme Court for permission to appeal that decision. Whilst the applicants may be encouraged by the “split” in the Court of Appeal decision, an appeal to the Supreme Court would represent a third level of appeal in this case, which is generally only granted in exceptional circumstances.

=> ↺ Raising the Bar Has Not Reduced the Patent Acceptance Rate in Australia

• Data on patent acceptances into 2021 confirms that the Intellectual Property Laws Amendment (Raising the Bar) Act 2012 (‘RtB Act’), which came into effect on 15 April 2013, has had a minimal impact on the rate of patent application acceptance in Australia – and to the extent that an effect is present, it does not run in the direction that might be expected! Here, I define ‘rate of acceptance’ as the proportion of examined applications that go on to be accepted for grant. Between 2009 and 2013, the rate at which applications subject to the former (i.e. pre-RtB) provisions were accepted rose from 69% to 72%. In comparison, the acceptance rate of post-RtB applications has stabilised at around 75% in each year between 2017 and 2021.

• Some people may have anticipated that, in raising the standard of inventive step and introducing stricter requirements for enablement and support of claims, the RtB reforms would result in fewer applications being accepted. I was not one of those people, and I expect that neither were most other patent attorneys. Those of us who work on behalf of patent applicants are well-aware that, firstly, most of those applicants are seeking patent protection in other jurisdictions that have high standards of patentability, and are not wasting time and money on equivalent Australian applications for inventions that do not meet those standards. And, secondly, encountering a higher bar to acceptance does not necessarily mean abandoning the application altogether; often it may simply mean settling for a more limited scope of protection.

=> ↺ New Ericsson lawsuit is a direct challenge to Apple’s 2019 FRAND manifesto

• Litigation launched by Ericsson on Monday in the Eastern District of Texas, challenging Apple’s 2019 FRAND manifesto, comes just two months after a major Fifth Circuit appeals court ruling went the Swedish company’s way

=> ↺ PTAB Denies IPR Institutions Without Patent Owner Rebuttal Evidence

• It is no secret that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) often leverages its discretionary denial powers to deny inter parties review (IPR) petitions. The PTAB has discretionarily denied IPR petitions, for example, due to parallel district court scheduled trials, district court findings of indefiniteness, and overbroad challenges. Typically, in these cases, the Patent Owner rebuts some of the Petitioner’s evidence of invalidity. But what happens when the Patent Owner decides not to rebut Petitioner’s evidence at all? In reviewing IPR institution decisions, the PTAB often substitutes its own technical analysis to refute Petitioner’s evidence. Yet, when it comes to final decisions—post-institution—the Federal Circuit has found that absent Patent Owner rebuttal evidence, Petitioner’s evidence is substantial evidence sufficient for prevailing on the merits. This begs the question—why is Petitioner’s unrebutted evidence insufficient to prove a reasonable likelihood of prevailing on the merits for an institution decision?

=> ↺ Judge Meade: why skeleton brevity can help ease complexity

• The England and Wales High Court judge discusses why time is of the essence in patent trials, his ‘radical’ Apple v Optis ruling, and the DABUS debate

=> ↺ U.S. Trade Representative Responds to Letters from Senators Regarding TRIPS Waiver

• Last week, United States Trade Representative Katherine C. Tai responded to a series of letters sent by a group of Senators regarding a proposal by India and South Africa to waive certain provisions of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) in relation to prevention, containment, or treatment of COVID-19. The most recent letter to Ambassador Tai was sent on October 7, 2021 by Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC), the Ranking Member of the Subcommittee on Intellectual Property of the Senate Committee of the Judiciary. Sen. Tillis’ letter included as Annexes three prior letters sent to Ambassador Tai: a May 19, 2021 letter sent by a group of sixteen Senators, a July 14, 2021 letter sent by Sen. Tillis and Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR), and an April 16, 2021 letter sent by Sen. Tillis (all three letters were also addressed to the Secretary of the Department of Commerce, Gina M. Raimondo).

=> ↺ UK patents court declines stay of infringement proceedings relating to patent for treatment of insomnia

=> ↺ so many fake patents coming from the EPO these days

• This decision, handed down on 29 October 2021, illustrates how a consideration of the principles previously laid down by the Court of Appeal may in some, albeit unusual, circumstances, result in the UK Patents Court declining to follow the default position and grant a stay of UK infringement proceeding pending a validity decision from the European Patent Office.

• In this case, the court considered an application by Mylan UK Healthcare Limited (“Mylan”) for a stay of infringement proceedings brought by Neurim Pharmaceuticals (1991) Limited (“Neurim”) in the UK Patents Court for infringement of its patent EP(UK) 3,103,443 (the “Patent”) relating to a “Method for treating primary insomnia”. The stay was sought pending the outcome of opposition proceedings brought by Mylan at the European Patent Office (“EPO”). The trial of the infringement action was scheduled for December 2021.

=> ↺ Challenge to Patent Board Disclaimer Rule Rejected on Appeal

• The Patent Trial and Appeal Board properly ruled against a patent owner after he voluntarily relinquished the claims of a rollover prevention invention, the Federal Circuit said.

• Arsus LLC abandoned its U.S. Patent No. 10,259,494 after the Patent Trial and Appeal Board instituted review requested by Unified Patents LLC. The board construed the statutory disclaimer as a request for adverse judgment.

• Arsus appealed, telling the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit at argument Nov. 2 that the board’s ruling is “like firing into a dead body.” The judges pushed back on this argument at the hearing, and affirmed …

=> ↺ Patenting Antibodies: The epitope claim is dead, long live the epitope claim

• Antibodies may be defined in a patent claim by their amino acid sequence or by the sequence of the target (epitope) to which the antibody binds. Historically, epitope claims were relatively common in the field of antibody patents, as they represented a way of broadly protecting any antibody that bound the same epitope. As the field of therapeutic monoclonal antibodies has grown, epitope claims have become progressively more difficult to obtain. Patent offices around the world now commonly insist that a claimed antibody is defined by its structural characteristics and not just by its function. The recent US case law in Amgen v Sanofi particularly has been hailed as signalling the death of the epitope claim. In Europe, by contrast, the case law on epitope claims is patchy. Nonetheless, recent first instance decisions indicate that the EPO remains comfortable with the broad claim format of epitope claims.

=> ↺ Decision Of The Boards Of Appeal T 0066/18

=> ↺ which itself violates the EPC

• In this decision, the Board refused a request from the opponent to appoint the entire costs of the opposition proceedings to the patentee on the basis of Art. 104(1) EPC because of the inequitable conduct of the patentee when filing the application, making the filing of the opposition necessary.

=> ↺ The Irish Courts Strengthen Their Position As A Jurisdiction For Resolving IP And Technology Disputes

• October 2021 has seen the most significant ever changes in how the Irish Courts will deal with IP and technology disputes. These welcome changes aim to ensure that such disputes are dealt with as efficiently, expeditiously and as cost effectively as possible. These changes herald a new era for the resolution of IP and technology disputes in this jurisdiction.

=> ↺ Pharma Patents In The Pandemic

• In 2020, the number of international patent applications filed via WIPO continued to grow amid the COVID-19 pandemic, and within the field of technology, medical technology took 3rd place with 6.6%. Many of us experienced a rush to claim antiviral usage of inventions that prior to 2020 might not have had that as their foremost aspect.

• There is currently in particular a noticeable renewed interest in vaccine and antibody-related patents, as well as in second medical treatment patents for use in the COVID-19 spectrum.

=> ↺ COVID Vaccine Diplomacy and Patent Law Doctrine

=> ↺ Access to medicines critical in European Parliament vote on EU IP action plan

• The European Parliament Own Initiative Report on an intellectual property action plan is an important step to support the EU’s recovery and resilience following the pandemic and on equitable access to medicine.

=> ↺ Moderna–National Institutes of Health spat over inventorship opens new front in COVID-19 vaccine patent battle

• In recent weeks, a new front has opened in the long-running war over COVID-19 vaccine patents: a fight between Moderna and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over who exactly deserves credit for inventing the Moderna vaccine.

=> ↺ Austria is close to ratification of the Protocol on Provisional Application of the Agreement on a Unified Patent Court

=> ↺ They need the UK

• In its report of November 11, the Parliamentary Committee on Research, Innovation and Digitisation of the Republic of Austria has unanimously decided to recommend the ratification of the PAP to the plenary (see attached report).

=> ↺ Shaping The Future Of Italy’s Intellectual Property System

• On June 23, 2021, Italy’s Ministry for Economic Development adopted the “Lines of strategic intervention on industrial property for the years 2021-2023.” The initiative is part of the broader implementation of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

• A prior public consultation conducted by Italy’s Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) allowed the strategic intervention plan to accommodate stakeholders’ inputs, including law firms, universities, not-for-profit associations, companies and other interested parties.

=> ↺ Indian patent filings grow despite pandemic

=> ↺ How to turn your ideas into patents

=> ↺ WIPO

• Researchers and intellectual-property specialists offer their tips for deciding which discoveries are worth patenting, and how to do the homework needed for success.

=> ↺ FOSS Patents: After Google’s announcement of bad-faith compliance with in-app payments law, South Korean lawmakers must go back to the drawing board if they respect themselves and want to be respected

• Barring the unforeseeable, I intend not to comment again on app store matters after this post until the Ninth Circuit has ruled on (and most likely will have granted) Apple’s motion for a stay of Epic’s injunction. But a follow-up to the previous post, which I just linked to, is warranted by Google’s official announcement of how the search giant and mobile operating system market leader intends to “comply with the [new South Korean in-app payments] law” (quotation marks are not enough to put this into perspective).

• That’s because the issue is precisely the same one. The South Korean law theoretically requires Apple and Google to do what Epic Games has so far failed to win in court (except in the eyes of a journalist who may never stop reiterating clearly erroneous legal interpretations) and the odds tend to be against Epic’s appeal). Yet the bill proves pointless, useless, worthless in practice. But I strongly suspect that this is not how the South Korean legislature wants to be seen, so this is presumably not the end of the story.

• The tax and review tyranny of the two leading mobile app stores (Apple’s iOS App Store and Google’s Android equivalent named Google Play) is under attack on multiple fronts in different ways. There is litigation, which has so far not helped in any meaningful way other than exposing certain issues; there are antitrust investigations, the mere specter of which already played a key role in getting Apple and Google to change some of their terms; and there are legislative initiatives, with South Korea theoretically having been ahead of the rest of the world but now risking to be nothing more than Apple and Google’s laughing stock.

=> ↺ Why most in-house prefer specialist over generalist prosecutors

• Counsel from Toyota, Honeywell and four other companies say technology specialisations are often crucial during patent prosecution

=> ↺ TSMC has catalogued more than 140,000 trade secrets since 2013, company says

• Company says trade secrets form its most important intellectual property, and is working with suppliers to implement best practices for their management

=> ↺ Inside the record of the patent litigator touted as Biden’s USPTO chief choice

• IP insiders in Washington DC believe that President Joe Biden could soon nominate Kathi Vidal, managing partner of Winston & Strawn’s Silicon Valley office, to be the next USPTO director

=> ↺ Three ways Leahy’s retirement could shake up IP

=> ↺ Mr. AIA

• Leahy’s departure will leave Congress with less direction on IP matters, but could also speed up PTAB reform and hand more influence to pro-patent people

Software Patents

=> ↺ Setting A Proper Confidence Factor Threshold In Speech Recognition: Non-Technical

• This decision relates to a European patent application that concerns improving the speed and accuracy of speech recognition when one or more expected responses are likely. Speech recognition per se is typically recognized as being technical. However, the Board decided that the contribution of the distinguishing feature, to set a proper confidence factor threshold of the generated hypothesis based on the expected response, was based on the selection of certain mathematical operations, and thus not technical. Here are the practical takeaways from the decision T 1898/17 (Speech recognition/Vocollect) of October 5, 2021 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.4.01:

=> ↺ Editing 3D Content: Non-technical

• This decision relates to a European patent application for a system and method that enables users without any skills specific to 3D software to edit 3D content. Here are the practical takeaways from the decision T 2448/16 () of 25.6.2021 of Technical Board of Appeal 3.4.03:

=> ↺ Patenting the AI pipeline: intellectual property for AI before standardisation

• Driven and enabled by the extraordinary growth of data globally, this surge in the AI industry has also spurred a flood of AI-related patenting. It is difficult to overstate the speed at which AI-based inventions have become part of the computing world and part of the patent landscape. Figure 1 shows the number of issued US patents per year that include AI-related terms in their description. In the early 2000s, around 1,000 US patents were issued each year that included the terms ‘back propagation’, ‘computer vision’, ‘object recognition’, ‘natural language processing’, ‘artificial intelligence’, ‘machine learning’ (ML) or ‘deep learning’. Beginning in about 2009, however, those numbers show nearly exponential growth. Similarly, a 2020 study by the EPO found that filings in the “core technologies underlying artificial intelligence” increased, on average, by 54.6% each year since 2010 (Patents and the Fourth Industrial Revolution, the EPO). Evidently, protecting AI inventions has become more popular with every year.

Trademarks

=> ↺ Shape Marks & Technical Necessity

• Products of distinctive shapes may be granted protection under the purview of Trademark Law. The shape of the Coca-Cola bottle…

=> ↺ Trademarks In Germany: Game-Changing Advantages

• Germany is home to some of the world’s most valuable brands, and also serves as an important foreign market for brand owners from numerous countries.

=> ↺ Est “modus” in rebus – Italian Supreme Court says no automatic award of a reasonable royalty following trade mark infringement

• Katfriend Gabriele Girardello (Pavia Ansaldo) reports on a recent decision of the Italian Supreme Court concerning damage calculation in cases of trade mark infringement.

• [...]

• The trade mark owner carries out its business through direct channels (e-commerce and single-brand shops) and its activity is characterized by the use of a rather well-known brand: “CAMICISSIMA” (literally meaning a superlative of ‘shirt’ in Italian, which could be translated as “supershirt”, therefore having arguably been the object of a secondary meaning phenomenon). This said, the trade mark of concern in this case was not CAMICISSIMA, but another trade mark instead, i.e. “MODO” (which literally can be translated into English as ‘mean’ or ‘way’… and in Latin as mŏdus), that the plaintiff has owned for over 20 years, although using it to a limited extent, so to at least avoid revocation due to non-use.

• The infringement of the MODO trade mark by the competitor was literal, as the infringer had been using the same sign to identify its shirts. In such a context the court of first instance (obviously) declared that an infringement had occurred and, in the absence of significant elements to calculate the damages, held that they could be awarded by applying the ‘reasonable royalty’ criterion, as requested by the trade mark owner. In particular, the court set the royalty rate at a minimum of 2.5% (compared to a possible maximum of 10.5%) of the turnover of the infringer. That was done in consideration of the limited diffusion of the trade mark in question, as also inferred from the evidence offered by the plaintiff.

• The infringer appealed against, only with reference to the award of damages. The court of appeal reversed the first instance decision, stating that even if the reasonable royalty criterion is a suitable way to assess damages, it cannot be used as an ‘automatic’ consequence of infringement.

=> ↺ German FCJ: Trademark owners bear the burden of proof for the public recognition of a trademark

• The German Federal Court of Justice recently published a decision (Case No. I ZB 16/20) clarifying that trademark owners bear the burden of proof for public recognition of a trademark within the affected trade circles in cancellation proceedings as well as in trademark application proceedings. It is the owner of a trademark who is best placed to prove that a sign has become established in the affected trade circles as a result of its use, so in cancellation proceedings they are also required to prove those circumstances from which the continued existence of the trademark results.

=> ↺ INTA 2021: Cannabis, alcohol and gambling counsel share top trademark tips

• Lawyers at TPCO, Caesars Entertainment and Arterra Wines highlighted the trademark challenges of highly regulated sectors at an INTA virtual event

Copyrights

=> ↺ Law must make way for new tech soon: AI copyright co-author

• In an interview, Ankit Sahni says legal recognition of emerging tech is important for incentivising innovation and meeting new-age commercial needs

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