Source: http://techrights.org/2018/01/30/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 02:35:19+00:00

Document:
THE UNITED STATES is certainly moving away from software patents. Don’t be misled by those who claim otherwise. They’re typically those who stand to gain (financially) from the practice of patenting algorithms — not because they actually develop software/write code but because they work for law firms that milk coders. I have been writing about it since my early 20s and I know how these people think. They’re not honest. They tend to be pretty greedy and they justify their lies to themselves (e.g. about coders needing patents and about software patents having ‘teeth’ in the UK).
What planet is he living on?! The US cracks down on software patents. The only thing on the rise is invalidation of software patents.
Record year for PTAB, as we noted here before, is something that even foes of PTAB find themselves having to admit today (IAM’s own headline said “PTAB breaks records” a few hours ago). PTAB is very important because it eliminates many USPTO-granted software patents, even when there’s no lawsuit but merely a threat of one (trolls do this a lot, especially to poor people/businesses because it keeps the racket safer from scrutiny). There’s nothing new to see in that IAM article; IAM is just reprinting charts from RPX and Unified Patents. Let’s pretend for a moment that IAM is serious journalism and not just lobbying. Oh, wait; never mind… that would be hard to pretend.
Last week, the Federal Circuit affirmed the rejection by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board of claims 1-7 of U.S. Patent No. 6,284,471 as being unpatentable under the doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting. Janssen Biotech, Inc. and New York University (“Janssen”), co-assignees of the ’471 patent, argued on appeal that obviousness-type double patenting was not applicable because the safe-harbor provision of 35 U.S.C. § 121 protected the ’471 patent claims. In affirming the Board’s decision, however, the Federal Circuit determined that the ’471 patent was not entitled to safe-harbor protections.
The opinion concludes with the panel finding to be unpersuasive Janssen’s argument that the Board erred by failing to apply a two-way test for double patenting. Instead, the panel concluded that Janssen failed to establish that the PTO is “solely responsible” for any alleged delay associated with the issuance of the ’471 patent. Finding that the ’471 patent was not entitled to safe-harbor protections, and that the Board did not err in applying the one-way test for double patenting, the Federal Circuit affirmed the Board’s rejection of claims 1–7 of the ’471 patent as being unpatentable under the doctrine of obviousness-type double patenting.
The Federal Circuit (CAFC) almost always agrees with PTAB. In 2016 and 2017 estimates stood at about 80% validation rate (CAFC validating the PTAB’s judgments in 4 out of 5 cases). The patent microcosm does not like pointing it out because it wants us to think that PTAB does mock trials or is a “kangaroo court” (Watchtroll used that smear yesterday).
Many software-related and business method-related patents have been invalidated for being directed to “abstract ideas.” On January 10, 2018, in Finjan, Inc., v. Blue Coat Systems, Inc., the Federal Circuit affirmed the district court’s holding that Finjan’s U.S. Patent No. 6,154,844 (“the ’844 patent”)  was not directed to an abstract idea and was therefore patent eligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The court’s threshold test for patent eligibility under § 101 is “whether the claims focus on the specific asserted improvement in computer capabilities . . . or, instead on a process that qualifies as an ‘abstract idea’ for which computers are invoked merely as a tool.”  The court’s recent decision provides additional guidance regarding the types of claims that constitute specific improvements in computer capabilities rather than being abstract ideas. The court additionally ruled on issues of infringement and damages.
The intellectual property protection of software is extremely important for every industry. After all, the modern society depends on computer software. However, the intellectual property of it has been debated in recent years. Back in 2014, the United States Supreme Court made a huge patent decision. They stated that simply adding computer language to ordinary aspects of technology were not enough for someone to deserve a patent.
Before this decision was made, many thought that software patents would be completely eliminated. The Supreme Court decided not to take it that far and noted that software patents will still be allowed. Nevertheless, in order for someone to earn a patent, they would have to either improve an existing technological process or improve the functioning of the computer. Following this decision, a lot of patents became invalid since district court judges figured that most of them were simply abstract ideas that never even deserved a patent to begin with. It also became harder to obtain software patents because of the expectations.
It’s hard to predict the future of computer software patentability. After all, there haven’t been a lot of cases where a software invention was eligible for a patent. However, each case helps inventors learn more about how to determine patent eligibility for their innovations. Every company is encouraged to at least try and see if their software patents could be valid, even though the odds are against them.
The odds are indeed against them. Last year CAFC threw away pretty much every software patent. The Supreme Court won't overturn its judgment on Alice-type cases any time soon (if ever).
Reaffirming the breadth of the Akamai standard for divided infringement, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit vacated a summary judgment of non-infringement where two steps of a four-step method for luggage screening were performed by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) rather than by the defendant. Travel Sentry, Inc. v. Tropp, Case Nos. 16-2386; -2387; -2714; 17-1025 (Fed. Cir., Dec. 19, 2017) (O’Malley, J).
THE EPO is wasting millions of euros (stakeholders’ money) on lawyers, simply in order for them to help cover up Battistelli’s abuses. That also means crushing staff (his victims, whose legal budget isn’t limitless). We wrote about it earlier today. The EPO has said nothing about it. The EPO’s Twitter feed is full of fluff (“You just came up with some buzzword/acronym and then claim that many things belong to it,” I told them; they pay the media to ‘plant’ some puff pieces about this at the expense of stakeholders/EPO budget, conveniently forgetting that they're supposed to be a patent office).
“For similar reasons (hosting international organisations like ICC), the Dutch government does not want to remove Battistelli’s immunity when he breaks the law and ILO in Geneva is far too soft on the EPO.”What about people who are actually impacted by these laws? It’s like they don’t seem to matter to Germany. As for the EPO, it’s a convenient cash cow owing to its location. It oughtn’t be a taboo subject. The staff representation said it very clearly, repeatedly even. For similar reasons (hosting international organisations like ICC), the Dutch government does not want to remove Battistelli’s immunity when he breaks the law and ILO in Geneva is far too soft on the EPO. This is a mutual back-rubbing exercise rather than real accountability and justice. They construct a hypothetical or theoretical hierarchy of accountability (like the EPC attempted to do), but it clearly doesn’t function.
Andrew Dobbie is one of those visionaries who saw his love of Linux and computer reimaging as a unique learning opportunity for his students.
The Btrfs file-system updates were mailed in and subsequently pulled today to the mainline tree for the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window.
There are some minor improvements like a zero range mode for fallocate, code clean-ups, improved bio merging on multiple devices, compression heuristic changes, and other small work.
With Linux 4.16 is initial support for the Jailhouse hypervisor to support native Linux guests in non-root cells.
The past half-decade Siemens has been developing the Jailhouse partitioning hypervisor that is lighter than KVM and designed for their demanding, real-time, safety and security critical workloads. With Linux 4.16 the first bits of it are being mainlined in the Linux kernel in the form of the new JAILHOUSE_GUEST option to allow non-root cells to let Linux run as a guest.
The block subsystem updates have now landed in Linus Torvalds’ Git tree during the first full day of the Linux 4.16 kernel merge window.
There isn’t any “breakthrough” new block features for Linux 4.16 but the block optimizations are notable and I look forward to benchmarking that shortly.
L2 Code and Data Prioritization (L2 CDP) is a feature of Intel’s Resource Director Technology (RDT) that will now be supported with the Linux 4.16 kernel.
Intel RDT’s L2 Code and Data Prioritization feature allows for programmatic control over code and data placement in the L2 cache. This feature will be supported by future Intel Atom CPUs and is intended for use-cases where precise L2 cache control is desired for a VM/container/application.
After a long wait, the much-anticipated Linux kernel 4.15 is finally here. While these kernel releases are always important, this one is particularly noteworthy. Why? Because it largely focuses on Spectre and Meltdown mitigation. With that said, it is not only about those vulnerabilities, of course.
During the release Linux Kernel release cycle, Torvalds typically issues a release candidate once a week, with most cycles including six to eight release candidates.
With the in-development Linux 4.16 kernel there is now support for PCID with Microsoft Hyper-V virtualization guests.
Today, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) voted to accept Rook as the 15th hosted project alongside Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, Fluentd, Linkerd, gRPC, CoreDNS, containerd, rkt, CNI, Envoy, Jaeger, Notary and TUF.
Rook has been accepted as an inception-level project, under the CNCF Graduation Criteria v1.0. The CNCF provides every project an associated maturity level of either inception, incubating or graduated. At a minimum, an inception-level project is required to add value to cloud native computing and be aligned with the CNCF charter.
AT&T has announced that it will open source its Disaggregated Network Operating System (dNOS) project and that it will soon be hosted by the Linux Foundation. The dNOS project provides a software framework to speed the adoption and use of white boxes in a service provider’s infrastructure. The idea is that telcos, software developers, cloud providers, hardware makers and networking application developers can quickly create new white box infrastructure to meet evolving carrier requirements – and, perhaps just as importantly, do it in a more cost-effective way.
BuildStream is an integration tool which deals with trees of binary files, and at present it uses OSTree to help with storing, identifying and transferring these trees of binary files.
tmux stands for terminal multiplexer, it allows users to create/enable multiple terminals (vertical & horizontal) in single window, this can be accessed and controlled easily from single window when you are working with different issues.
It uses a client-server model, which allows you to share sessions between users, also you can attach terminals to a tmux session back. We can easily move or rearrange the virtual console as per the need. Terminal sessions can freely rebound from one virtual console to another.
DomTerm is a modern terminal emulator that uses a browser engine as a “GUI toolkit.” This enables some neat features, such as embeddable graphics and links, HTML rich text, and foldable (show/hide) commands. Otherwise it looks and feels like a feature-full, standalone terminal emulator, with excellent xterm compatibility (including mouse handling and 24-bit color), and appropriate “chrome” (menus). In addition, there is built-in support for session management and sub-windows (as in tmux and GNU screen), basic input editing (as in readline), and paging (as in less).
In early October, our club, Geeks and Gadgets from Marshall University, participated in the inaugural Open Jam, a game jam that celebrated the best of open source tools. Game jams are events where participants work as teams to develop computer games for fun. Jams tend to be very short—only three days long—and very exhausting. Opensource.com announced Open Jam in late August, and more than three dozen games were entered into the competition.
Our club likes to create and use open source software in our projects, so Open Jam was naturally the jam we wanted to participate in. Our submission was an experimental game called Mark My Words. We used a variety of free and open source (FOSS) tools to develop it; in this article we’ll discuss some of the tools we used and potential stumbling blocks to be aware of.
After more than 18 months of development, all Godot Engine contributors are proud to present our biggest release so far, Godot 3.0! It brings a brand new rendering engine with state-of-the-art PBR workflow for 3D, an improved assets pipeline, GDNative to load native code as plugins, C# 7.0 support, Bullet as the 3D physics engine, and many other features which are described in depth below.
The open-source game engine developers behind the huge Godot 3.0 update out before the end of January as planned.
Not nearly as close as FOSDEM, but still coming up on the KDE Community calendar: Akademy 2018. It’s in Vienna. I vaguely remember visiting Vienna once, long ago — possibly an FSFE function. So it’s high time to head out that way again to visit the local KDE team and to see what 2017-2018 has brought (and will bring) the KDE community.
Since version 3 it becomes KEXI not Kexi to suggest becoming a standalone app. It’s standalone status includes being first-class app also outside of KDE Plasma. To make this real things such as useful yet simple file widget are developed or single click mode is really single click mode “even” on XFCE. Actually implementing optimal experience for Windows is quite similar to supporting XFCE.
KEXI Frameworks are now prepared for backward compatibility rules within the series >=3.1. So I would encourage to try KProperty if you need powerful property editing features in your app in place of tedious Qt list or tree views. There’s KPropertyExample in the same repository. Then there’s KDb if you actually expect more (something low or high-level) than QtSql, that is also need to create database or SQLite-based documents, what seems to be very popular container in our times. Then try KReport if you want escape from generating (ODF/HTML/whatever) documents “by hand”, or QPainting them by hand, just to be able to print your application’s data in a structured way with nice title, header, footer. Try KReportExample to see KReport in action with “a few lines of code” app.
New artwork for Falkon, do you have any ideas?
The lead developer has called for submissions on a new logo for Falkon. One of the current submissions, which I must say I love, is shown below by Andres Betts who is on the KDE VDG team.
Most of the Linux distros that are in use today are either created and developed in the US or Europe. A young developer from Bangladesh wants to change all that.
Users of the openSUSE Tumbleweed rolling operating system series received a lot of goodies last week, and openSUSE Project’s Douglas DeMaio is informing us on the latest snapshots and updates.
The new release of the Chromium sources gives us version 64 of Google’s browser. I have created Slackware packages for you, but that was not entirely trivial.
The Chromium compilation on my 32bit Slackware OS kept failing on the embedded ffmpeg. I am afraid the fact that some of the bigger distros are dropping 32bit variants starts showing and things are coming apart at the seams.
When you are a developer and there’s no 32bit release of your favorite OS, this makes it quite difficult to test the validity of code paths when you only compile and test your code on a 64bit platform. This is what’s happening with Google’s Chromium code and it will probably only get worse.
Ten years’ worth of effort to replace the Xorg graphics framework has been given a “must try harder” mark by Ubuntu, which says its next release will not use Wayland by default.
Ubuntu’s desktop engineering manager Will Cooke made the announcement last Friday, saying the decision applies to the Bionic Beaver release due in April.
He listed three shortcomings in Wayland: screen sharing works (for example in Skype, Hangouts and WebRTC) better in Xorg, remote desktop control ditto, and “recoverability from Shell crashes is less dramatic”.
System76, the computer reseller specialized in the sale of Linux-based notebook, desktop, and server computers, shared details on new installer work for the next release of Pop!_OS Linux.
It would appear that System76 is collaborating with elementary’s Daniel Foré on a new installer, which will offer full disk encryption support, for the next major release of their Ubuntu-Based Pop!_OS Linux distribution, which is coming this spring based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system.
Aaeon’s “RICO-3399” SBC runs Android 7.0 on the Rockchip RK3399, with 2x Cortex-A72 and 4x -A53 cores, plus 2GB RAM, 16GB eMMC, and GbE, HDMI 2.0, USB 3.0, serial, and mini-PCIe connections.
Automated software container security company Twistlock claims to be passionate about open source contributions.
Company CTO John Morello points out that all too few firms actually contribute with ‘code commits’ despite many claiming to be open source advocates, or openly stating their use of open technologies.
Since its invention in 2009, blockchain has evolved to become a major revolutionary technology of the digital world. Decentralized tech like Bitcoin, Ethereum and several other cryptocurrencies and ventures have established and utilized the proficiency of blockchain in making money. There is a new player in the market and it is called Cardstack, a likely solution for decentralized internet founded by Chris Tse.
Ask Joshua Montgomery what’s wrong with smart speakers like the Amazon Echo and Google Home, and you’ll likely get a cynical answer.
Montgomery is the CEO of Mycroft, which for the past few years has been building an open-source alternative to big tech’s voice assistants. He doesn’t trust any of those companies–not Google, nor Apple, nor Amazon–to protect people’s privacy or act in users’ best interests.
I’ve presented a talk about Fleet Commander at DevConf CZ’2018, which basically show-cases the current status of the project after having the whole integration with FreeIPA and SSSD done!
Members of the Purism design team, Librem 5 development team, and PureOS developers will be meeting up and walking around the event, namely: François, Predrag (Peter), Jeff, Nicole, Dorota, Guido, Matthias and Zlatan will all be on-site. You can check out what they look like on our team page. Come and say hi!
Rest assured, in 2018, we will invest heavily in shaping public policy issues that contribute to and advance a healthy internet. We’ll continue our leadership on multi-year issues like privacy and security. We’ll keep fighting the critical ongoing battles like copyright reform and net neutrality. And we’re looking at emerging topics related to openness and decentralization, understanding and fighting back against the future of gatekeeper control of our internet. We also have incredible depth left to be explored on how we perceive and experience trust online, and who around the world really gets included and can take full advantages of the opportunities of the internet. Some of the policy issues we tackle will be major headlines, even more so in 2018 than they were in 2017 – issues like competition, artificial intelligence, and intermediary liability. And we will be there. Across the board, in 2018, we will engage in public policy wherever we can to promote a healthy, open, trusted internet.
The web is the largest software platform ever, a great equalizer that works on any device, anywhere. The more it can do, the better off we’ll be. That’s the thinking behind Progressive Web Apps (PWA), mobile-friendly websites that can almost everything native apps can do, and they’re coming to Firefox for Android.
Mozilla has sent a CA Communication to inform Certificate Authorities (CAs) who have root certificates included in Mozilla’s program about current events related to domain validation for SSL certificates and to remind them of a number of upcoming deadlines.
I’ve recently switched groups at Mozilla to start working full-time on improving Rust debugging.
Some users who bravely test betas of Mozilla’s Firefox browser will soon also test an “occasional sponsored story” as the browser-maker tries to re-invent web ads.
This story starts with Mozilla’s February 2017 acquisition of web-clipping app Pocket.
Pocket let users bookmark content they like, then sync that list of sites across multiple devices. The occasional sponsored post popped up among those lists.
Ncurses 6.1 retains compatibility support for Ncurses 5.0/6.0, but adds in a variety of new features and improvements. There is now extended numeric capabilities, various internal code changes to enhance Ncurses’ performance, some new functions introduced, and a variety of corrections to existing features.
Despite the several issues I ran into, including the tech issues I encountered because of my pig-headed insistence on preserving a high level of security and some poor choices I made, I consider my ten day stay in Shenzhen a resounding success. I feel much more confident moving my project along and more solid in my understanding of hardware after the experience. It highlighted several issues and opened the door to several new possibilities. I don’t know of any other place in the world that I’ve traveled to that could offer this much for a hardware project. There are certainly much wider ramifications to such a realization than my personal interests and the hardware segment of the tech world, but that’s a separate topic.
Initially, the big question was whether Apple Inc. AAPL, -2.07% would be able to produce iPhone X devices quickly enough to meet demand for the phone, which was expected to drive a “supercycle” of upgrades. Now, however, analysts are wondering whether Apple might be easing up on build orders for the phone given that interest hasn’t quite manifested as anticipated, and whether this even matters for the stock.
Scientists used a portable device no bigger than a cellphone to sequence the most complete human genome ever assembled with a single technology, according to a study published Monday.
The breakthrough, detailed in the journal Nature Biotechnology, brings us closer to the day when family doctors will order up genome scans during a regular check-up along with blood work, the authors suggested.
“We are definitely approaching the point where sequencing genomes will become a routine part of advanced clinical exams,” lead author Matthew Loose, a professor at the University of Nottingham, told AFP.
Resistance is much less likely to develop with phages, because each type of phage infects a specific type of bacteria. Using them to fight infections is an old idea. But until recently, finding the right type of phage was little more than guesswork. Sometimes a doctor would inject a patient with a phage and it would work, and sometimes it wouldn’t.
As a result, phage therapy is now used only for the sickest patients, as a treatment of last resort. But DNA sequencing and artificial intelligence could make finding the right phage much easier, turning the strategy into a more practical treatment option.
Existing patches can fix Meltdown, but only seem to be able to mitigate Spectre, not fix it. By many accounts, we’ll be playing whack-the-vulnerability with Spectre until at least the next generation of silicon.
In case you’re running a Lenovo business machine with a built-in fingerprint sensor, you might want to install the latest security patch issued by the company.
According to a security advisory published last week, the Lenovo Fingerprint Manager Pro software on many ThinkPad, ThinkCentre, and ThinStation systems contains a critical local privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2017-3762).
In a speech at Stanford this month, US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson declared that America intends to keep military troops in Syria indefinitely, in pursuit of the US’s “key end states for Syria,” including “post-Assad leadership,” the marginalization of Iran and the elimination of “weapons of mass destruction” that the US claims Syria has.
Occupying a country without the permission of the host government, as America is doing in Syria, contravenes international law. Nor does the US have a legal right to pursue regime change in Syria. Yet multiple media outlets have praised Tillerson’s remarks.
Did Don Jr. (and not Twitter) Disclose DMs Referring to Wikileaks Lawyer?
Upon further review of the Twitter Direct Messages that Donald Trump Jr. disclosed between himself and Wikileaks on Nov. 13, it is evident that Wikileaks requested that Donald Trump Jr. contact Wikileaks lawyer Margaret Kuntsler and disclose to her the emails that were mentioned in a New York Times article. Wikileaks sent that message to Don Jr. on July 11th, 2017.
Journalism lost one of its most valuable investigators when Robert Parry died from pancreatic cancer on January 27, at the age of 68. He was the first reporter to reveal Oliver North’s operation in the White House basement (AP, 6/10/1985), and the co-author of the first report on Contra drug-smuggling (AP, 12/21/1985). He did some of the most important work investigating the 1980 Reagan campaign’s efforts to delay the return of US hostages held in Iran, a scandal known as the October Surprise.
After breaking his first big stories with the Associated Press, Bob moved on to Newsweek and then later PBS‘s Frontline. Frustrated with the limits and compromises of corporate media—he was once told that a story on Contra financial skullduggery had to be watered down because Newsweek owner Katharine Graham was having Henry Kissinger as a weekend guest (Media Beat, 4/23/98)—Bob launched his own online outlet, Consortium News.
Right. I’m in a mood. This is for several reasons, enumeration of which will not serve you, the reader, but will certainly make me feel better. So, bugger your needs, and away-we go with mine: It’s Monday; I am uncomfortably warm and fear the imminent nuisance of menopause; my other flower garden is certainly dead to a heat now hovering at 39C, or 102F if you’d rather the American money. Oh, and I write from the territory usually known as Australia, which will almost certainly burst into flames long before it is ever ceded by just treaty. My coerced association with this Hot’n’Racist franchisee has become fatally embarrassing.
As if this were not enough, Meryl Streep has another Oscar nomination for Best Actress, or Best Performance By An Empowering Lady In A Business, or whatever it is they call it these days. I don’t know, and, honestly, I wouldn’t care if (a) I were not now so sweaty and embarrassed (b) twits didn’t keep banging on about Meryl and the Freedom of the Press, as if such a thing could be meaningfully said to exist.
The “early draft”, which the Tory government tried to keep secret, has prompted a fresh row between Remainers who say they were vindicated and Leavers who brand it Project Fear.
There was already a huge spat hours before its release after Brussels demanded new EU laws apply to Britain for 21 months after Brexit day. Theresa May is facing threats to her leadership as she tries to hold together warring factions at a Cabinet meeting this morning.
Titled “EU Exit Analysis – Cross Whitehall Briefing” and obtained by BuzzFeed News, the document looked at the three most likely outcomes of Brexit.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has criticized a bill passed last week by the Polish Sejm which would make phrases like “Polish death camps” illegal.
The bill would amend an existing law to make use of the term by Poles or foreigners punishable by a fine or up to three years’ imprisonment. It still requires approval by the Senate and a signature from Polish President Andrzej Duda, which is likely.
Many user-generated content (UGC) services aspire to build scalable businesses where usage and revenues grow without increasing headcount. Even with advances in automated filtering and artificial intelligence, this goal is not realistic. Large UGC databases require substantial human intervention to moderate anti-social and otherwise unwanted content and activities. Despite the often-misguided assumptions by policymakers, problematic content usually does not have flashing neon signs saying “FILTER ME!” Instead, humans must find and remove that content—especially with borderline cases, where machines can’t make sufficiently nuanced judgments.
At the largest UGC services, the number of people working on content moderation is eye-popping. By 2018, YouTube will have 10,000 people on its “trust & safety teams.” Facebook’s “safety and security team” will grow to 20,000 people in 2018.
China’s efforts to undermine freedom of speech and freedom of the press continue unabated within the country’s borders.
After the 19th National People’s congress last year, it was widely recognized that China’s efforts towards “national rejuvenation” under President Xi Jinping would accompany increased online censorship and state supervision of domestic media platforms.
Over the past two months there have been orders to ban the use of all personal VPNs online, as well as efforts to further regulate what kinds of imagery is permitted on Chinese television, with the party declaring hip-hop and other urban subcultures unfit for public viewing.
I begin with acknowledging that, on at least one point, Mr. Husick accurately judges my disposition. I have no use for the treachery and deceit by which Edward Snowden breached his confidentiality commitments, manipulated and abused his access, and then betrayed his country. Notably, five years after the first of his well-reported disclosures, Snowden has yet to reveal any program or action undertaken by the National Security Agency (NSA) or any other element of the Intelligence Community that broke the law. As the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) concluded after its exhaustive post-Snowden review (and as remains true today), there has never been an intentional violation of the standards that govern the operation of the Section 702 Program—one of the most heavily regulated and tightly monitored undertakings conducted by the U.S. government.
Everywhere Americans look today, threats to their privacy are prevalent. Whether hackers are gaining access to our financial data or social media accounts, our location is being compromised by the GPS technology in our phones, or Internet of Things devices such as digital assistants and connected Barbie dolls passively listening to conversations in our homes, privacy is proving to be increasingly elusive.
According to The Washington Post report, the fitness tracking software company Strava—whose software is implemented into devices made by Fitbit and Jawbone—posted a “heat map” in November 2017 showing activity of some of its 27 million users around the world. Unintentionally included in that map were the locations, daily routines, and possible supply routes of disclosed and undisclosed U.S. military bases and outposts, including what appear to be classified CIA sites.
When the Snowden leaks dropped, plenty of people rushed to criticize his actions, saying he should have brought his concerns to officials via the proper channels. Always assumed to be mostly worthless, the intervening four years have proven nothing shoots messengers faster than the “proper channels.” Despite periodic legislative attempts to institute better whistleblower protections, working within the system rarely produces positive changes. It does, however, subject the whistleblower to plenty of retaliation.
This sad fact is personified by Dan Meyer — the former official whistleblower channel for the Intelligence Community. Meyer blew the whistle himself, pointing out wrongdoing by top IC officials. Now, he’s being forced out of office, clearing the path for the IC’s attempt to rebrand whistleblowers as “insider threats.” Meyer is facing an ad hoc Star Chamber of IC Inspector Generals, all of them apparently gunning for his swift removal.
The concerns are certainly justified: the vendor, Vigilant Solutions, offers access to 6.5 billion data points, plus millions more collected by law enforcement agencies around the country. Using advanced algorithms, this information—often collected by roving vehicles equipped with automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that scan every license plate they pass—can be used to reveal a driver’s travel patterns and to track a vehicle in real time.
Andy Robertson covered this for Forbes in May of 2015. The Flyby feature connects users by providing them links to public profile pages of other users they’d “passed” during a run. The feature may not give users each other’s addresses, but users can assume their “competitors” work or live close by.
This “metadata” — something our government refers to as harmless when gathered in bulk — can result in real-world security issues. Conflict analyst Nathan Ruser was the first to point out how Strava’s data was making it easy for people to pinpoint military bases and operations.
For years, I used the popular activity-tracking app Strava to log my bike rides, almost all of which started and ended at my San Francisco apartment. At some point I thought, hey, maybe it’s not a great idea to share such precise data about my location, so I set up an online perimeter several blocks in diameter around my home to make the beginning and end of my journey a little less obvious. That way, the app wouldn’t show my movements once I’d entered that zone.
Mark Anthony Pazmino, then a 28-year-old linguist assigned to the National Security Agency, showed up at the swimming pool of a local Air Force base with condoms and booze for a sexual encounter with someone he thought would be an underage teenage girl.
But Pazmino was not met by the 14-year-old who he believed was receiving his explicit messages via a cell phone app. Rather, federal agents were waiting for him. In short order, the Army corporal’s brief career and his stint at the NSA ended. He was later dismissed with an “other than honorable discharge” upon pleading guilty to attempted coercion and enticement of a minor.
On January 12, the National Security Agency (NSA) removed “honesty” from the core values listed on its website. To replace the word, “commitment to service” “respect for people,” and “accountability,” have been added.
While this may seem like linguistic nitpicking, it’s a bit strange for such a heavily-scrutinized government agency to drop their commitment to honesty. Ever since Edward Snowden leaked documents detailing the scope of the NSA’s surveillance and data collections, it’s been clear that the agency obfuscated the scale of their spying operations.
The judge hearing the Justice Department’s lawsuit to stop AT&T from buying Time Warner ordered the department on Monday to seek permission to give the two companies access to rivals’ pricing data.
There’s been a lot of hand wringing and hyperventilation over a new report claiming that the Trump administration wants to nationalize the nation’s looming fifth-generation (5G) wireless networks, despite the fact the proposal has a snowball’s chance in hell of ever actually materializing. According to a leaked PowerPoint deck and memo drafted by a “Senior National Security Council official,” the Trump administration wants the U.S. government to build and own a centralized, government-controlled 5G network in order to, purportedly, fight Chinese hackers.
Salt Lake Comic Con lawyers have filed a motion for a new trial following a federal jury’s decision that the convention infringes on San Diego Comic-Con’s trademark.
The Salt Lake lawyers filed the paperwork on Tuesday in response to last month’s eight-day trial in U.S. District Court, during which jurors decided that the California convention’s trademarks are valid. The jury found that the infringement was not willful and awarded $20,000 in damages to the San Diego Comic-Con, which had sought $12 million.
In the wake of San Diego Comic-Con winning its years-long lawsuit against Salt Lake Comicon over its trademark on the term “comic-con”, much of the media coverage was somewhat apocalyptic as to what the consequences would be for cons across the country. Despite the payout for winning the suit being a paltry $20k, more focus was put on just how other cons would react. The early returns are mixed, with some proactively undergoing name-changes to avoid litigation and others staying stalwart. The point we have made all along is that this win for SDCC was not some ultimate final act on the matter.
Nestle SA has settled a lawsuit in which Atari SA accused the Swiss food company of using the hit 1970s video game “Breakout” without permission to sell Kit Kat bars.
From manufacturing powerhouse to litigation hub; what would that cause to investment though?
AS we noted in our last post, it’s becoming a liability for firms to operate (e.g. sell) in China, manufacture in China, or be based in China because it makes them susceptible to more patent lawsuits. Korean, Japanese, European and American firms might learn this sooner or later.
IAM loves it, as its funding sources are litigators and even trolls. But what does that mean for the rest of us, who are neither litigators nor trolls?
Chinese smartphone maker Coolpad announced late Friday night that it has sued larger rival Xiaomi for infringing three Chinese invention patents. The cases will play out in the city where Coolpad is headquartered, at the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. Notably, it will be one of the first major patent clashes between major players in China’s smartphone sector to play out in domestic courts.
In a voluntary disclosure filed with the Stock Exchange of Hong Kong, Coolpad said that six separate cases have been accepted by the Shenzhen Intermediate People’s Court. The plaintiff is a subsidiary of the group called Yulong Computer Telecommunication Scientific.
Korean companies like Samsung are also being legally harassed in China by patent giants and trolls. It’s not the sort of environment it used to be; it’s a lot more hostile. There are even embargoes being imposed by the state (to protect state-connected firms like Huawei).
At the end of December 2017, Beijing IP Court decided the first GUI (graphical user interface) patent infringement case in China. This case is a battle between two anti-virus software giants: the plaintiff Qihoo 360 currently is the largest cyber security company in China; and the defendant Jiangmin is a pioneer anti-virus software provider in the PC era. Beijing IP Court rendered a decision in favour of Jiangmin.
China’s first lawsuit for infringement of graphical user interface (GUI) design has been recently concluded by the Beijing IP Court. This case has attracted much public attention, as GUI designs have become protectable in China by so-called design patents only as of 1 May 2014, and despite a large number of GUI design patents being granted since then, their enforceability remained untested until the present case. The judgment issued on 25 December 2017 now results in heated discussion and leaves, in particular, software developers counting on strong GUI design protection very disappointed.
It’s the district court in East Texas and, as a reminder, “Conversant acquired the Core Wireless portfolio of around 2,000 assets from Nokia in 2011.” Remember that Microsoft guided the transfer of patents from Nokia to Conversant (known as MOSAID back then). We have been writing a lot about that. Boris Teksler is aware of it.
A nonpracticing entity filed a series of patent infringement lawsuits last year against South Korea’s information technology giants, including Samsung Electronics and LG Electronics, in an apparent move to ride their recently improved sales in the US market, a local intellectual property service provider said Monday.
Most recently, Uniloc filed a suit to the federal court of Texas in October last year, claiming LG Electronics infringed upon one of its patents through products equipped with smart home platform system SmartThinQ, according to Seoul-based global patent information company WIPS and US-based patent risk solution provider Rational Patent Exchange.
San Francisco-based patent attorney Richard Hung never found an easy way to travel to eastern Texas to litigate patent cases.
But like hundreds of patent attorneys across the U.S., he had to. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas was once the most popular venue for patent infringement lawsuits in the country.
A partner at Morrison & Foerster, LLP and co-chair of the firm’s Intellectual Property Litigation Group, Hung would spend at least six hours hopping through airports to the regional business hub in Shreveport, La., then drive west on I-20 for 35 miles. Once, when a return flight from Shreveport was canceled, he was forced to drive more than 200 miles to Houston to fly home.
The TC Heartland decision, which held that a domestic corporation “resides” only in its state of incorporation, upended nearly 30 years of precedent in patent law and dramatically restricted where patent cases may be litigated. Previously, the rules for where a patent infringement lawsuit could be filed made it easy to select the east Texas court, which had a reputation for being a friendly venue for patent owners.
In what everyone (including the Patent Trial and Appeal Board) considers an unprecedented administrative action, the PTAB late last year set out an order (Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s Order, 2017 WL 5067421, P.T.A.B. Nov. 3, 2017) inviting amicus briefing on the question of whether the transfer of patent rights from Allergan to the St. Regis Mohawk Nation should lead the Board to dismiss several consolidated inter partes review actions (Nos. IPR2016-01127, IPR2016-01128, IPR2016-01129, IPR2016-01130, IPR2016-01131, and IPR2016-01132, instituted against U.S. Patent Nos. 8,685,930, 8,629,111, 8,642,556, 8,633,162, 8,648,048, and 9,248,191, respectively) on the grounds of sovereign immunity (see “Mohawk Nation Exercises Sovereign Immunity in Inter Partes Review”).
The Mohawk people/tribe hired lawyers who take the tribe for a ‘ride’, looking for anything by which to shoot the messengers (PTAB judges) while pretending to be poor Natives (they’re not; they’re rich, corrupt lawyers). The lawyers picked by the Mohawk people have disgraced the tribe to the point where it’s accused of “conspiracy theories” and a “scam”. Why can’t this tribe see the incredible damage already done to its reputation? It’s never too late to end this. They sold out though and ending it may result in loss of money (funneled through shells).
Watchtroll, in its usual fashion, has just used the Mohawk patent scam in an effort to make PTAB look bad. The tribe has been reduced to a tool.
They’re aiming to discredit PTAB rather than justify their ‘case’ (scam). Classic “shoot the messenger”.
These have absolutely nothing to do with the Mohawk scam; the lawyers they hired simply use them as a tool for anti-PTAB lobbying while attending events hosted by a think tank of the Koch Brothers. This doesn’t look good at all. Another attack on the same day (Watchtroll against PTAB) called PTAB a kangaroo court. Got to protect bad patent and patent trolls, eh? And the Mohawk people are used as a moral shield for people who are aligned with billionaires’ interests.
In 2007, Prof. John Duffy penned a Patently-O essay explaining that Administrative Patent Judges are at least “inferior officers” under the US Constitution (art. II, § 2, cl. 2) — requiring appointment by a Head of Department (i.e., Secretary of Commerce). Duffy’s work on the topic prompted statutory reform and now all PTAB follow that appointment process.
In a new article, Prof. Gary Larsen takes Duffy’s analysis a major step forward – explaining that the PTAB is special because its Inter Partes Review actions are not further reviewed by any executive actor — rendering Administrative Patent Judges principal officer (rather than inferior) and requiring appointment by the President with Advice and Consent of the Senate.
THE EPO may have become worse than the USPTO when it comes to patent quality if it’s true that it’s now easier to get software patents at the EPO than at the USPTO (as some law firms publicly claim). Then there’s the aspect of patents on life.
This is alarming because the EPO used to be the best bar none when it comes to patent quality. A European Patent (EP) offered very high legal certainty, e.g. in case a lawsuit gets filed.
Yesterday, IAM’s editor was reposting for Haseltine Lake LLP. It’s about that latest study of theirs (first mentioned by us about 3 weeks ago). It is, however, preceded by his introduction, which goes as follows (after calling the Battistelli era “highly controversial” — a gross understatement).
As President Battistelli sees out his final months, the big question is how much of an impact the changes have had. Well, if research by James Ward and Frances Wilding, partners at Haseltine Lake LLP, is correct, the answer is a great deal. In the following overview of detailed number-crunching they have done, the pair explain that the amount of grants the office made in 2017 is likely to have exceeded 100,000 for the very first time, while the examination backlog could be on the way down; though the number of oppositions is on the rise. What the numbers cannot tell us is whether there has been any impact on the quality of the rights the EPO issues – that, of course, will always be subjective (IAM readers have always seen the office as being the leader of the pack among the IP5).
IAM cites IAM to maintain the illusion that patent quality is OK under Battistelli. This is also what Battistelli keeps citing. Circular logic?
Mark Summerfield, an Australian patent maximalist, wrote that “Loss of CRISPR Priority in Europe is a Warning to All Patent Applicants” (more like “Loss of CRISPR Priority in Europe is Great News to People Who Object to Patents on Life”).
The EPO’s Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBA) recently issued its long-awaited decision G 1/16 relating to undisclosed disclaimers. The decision lays down under which circumstances the introduction during prosecution of a patent application before the EPO of a disclaimer not disclosed in the application as filed may be allowable under Article 123(2) EPC. The decision essentially confirms the standard defined in decision G 1/03 of 2004.
The more interesting news from Denmark, however, started with this press release (“Forward Pharma Announces the Decision of the European Patent Office in the Opposition Proceedings for the EP2801355 Patent”) and then an article titled “Here’s Why Forward Pharma Lost 30% Today” (published only hours ago).
Forward Pharma A/S (NASDAQ:FWP) (“Forward” or the “Company”) today announced that the European Patent Office (the “EPO”) has revoked the EP2801355 patent (the “’355 patent”) following the oral hearing in the Opposition Proceedings.
THE EPO has already come under several legal actions in Dutch courts. It sometimes even refused to obey court orders from Dutch judges whilst attacking Dutch nationals like Elizabeth Hardon (an EPO staff representative). It was around that time that the EPO funneled money to better control (mislead/silence/bribe) Dutch media with FTI Consulting's outside help. Battistelli, in his typical fashion, sought to derail journalism (nowadays the EPO does the same to academia). He tried hard; he just flings EPO budget at whatever official he needs a vote from, so why not publications too?

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