Contrary to the misconception that #OpenScience and #patents are not compatible, they co-exist.
Inventors can openly publish the findings after filing a patent application.
In countries like #Korea with a ‘grace period’ for pre-filing disclosures, inventors can publicly share their results even before submitting a patent application. Art. 30 of Korea’s Patent Act allows a 1-year grace period for various disclosures made before filing a patent application.
We published a transcript of "The state of software #patents in 2022" by FSF #licensing volunteer Panos, which was given during the 2022 LibrePlanet conference. The talk covers many important basics about patents and software patents in particular: https://u.fsf.org/3zr
We published a transcript of "The state of software #patents in 2022" by FSF #licensing volunteer Panos, which was given during the 2022 LibrePlanet conference. The talk covers many important basics about patents and software patents in particular: https://u.fsf.org/3zr
Here the UPC has been quite lenient on a claimant for revocation who wrongly identified the patentee. It may be less lenient in an infringement action where the defendant is not evident unless correctly stated.
Two footmen dressed in white approach the vehicle as it arrives. One opens the rear door. #Guo#Ping, one of #Huawei's rotating chairmen, steps forward and extends a hand as the guest emerges.
After walking a red carpet, the two men enter the magnificent marble-floored building, ascend a stairway, and pass through French doors to a palatial ballroom.
Several hundred people arise from their chairs and clap wildly.
The guest is welcomed by Huawei's founder, #Ren#Zhengfei, whose sky-blue blazer and white khakis signify that he has attained the power to wear whatever the hell he wants.
After some serious speechifying by a procession of dark-suited executives, Ren
—who is China's Bill Gates, Lee Iacocca, and Warren Buffett rolled into one
—comes to the podium.
Three young women dressed in white uniforms enter the room, swinging their arms military style as they march to the stage, then about-face in unison as one holds out a framed #gold#medal the size of a salad plate.
Embedded with a red Baccarat crystal, it depicts the Goddess of Victory and was manufactured by the Monnaie de Paris. Ren is almost glowing as he presents the medal to the visitor.
This #honored#guest is not a world leader, a billionaire magnate, nor a war hero. He is a relatively unknown Turkish academic named #Erdal#Arıkan.
Throughout the ceremony he has been sitting stiffly, frozen in his ill-fitting suit, as if he were an ordinary theatergoer suddenly thrust into the leading role on a Broadway stage.
Arıkan isn't exactly ordinary.
Ten years earlier, he'd made a major discovery in the field of information theory.
Huawei then plucked his theoretical breakthrough from academic obscurity and, with large investments and top engineering talent, fashioned it into something of value in the realm of commerce.
The company then muscled and negotiated to get that innovation into something so big it could not be denied:
the basic #5G#technology now being rolled out all over the world.
Huawei's rise over the past 30 years has been heralded in China as a triumph of smarts, sweat, and grit. Perhaps no company is more beloved at home
—and more vilified by the United States.
That's at least in part because Huawei's ascent also bears the fingerprints of China's nationalistic industrial policy and an alleged penchant for intellectual property theft;
the US Department of Justice has charged the company with a sweeping conspiracy of misappropriation, infringement, obstruction, and lies.
As of press time, Ren Zhengfei's #daughter was under house arrest in Vancouver, fighting extradition to the US for allegedly violating a ban against trading with Iran.
The US government has banned Huawei's 5G products and has been lobbying other countries to do the same. Huawei denies the charges; Ren calls them political.
Huawei is settling the score in its own way. One of the world's great technology powers, it nonetheless suffers from an inferiority complex.
Despite spending billions on research and science, it can't get the respect and recognition of its Western peers. Much like China itself.
So when Ren handed the solid-gold medal
—crafted by the French mint!
—to Erdal Arıkan, he was sticking his thumb in their eye.
It had failed to adapt, disappointed its customers, and was ill-prepared to respond to new Chinese competition.
And there was that hack.
Huawei seized the moment.
Nortel's most valuable asset was the unmatched talent in its Ottawa research lab, known as the Canadian equivalent of the legendary Bell Labs.
For years, Huawei had been building up its research capacity, trying to shed its reputation as a low-cost provider whose tech came from purloining the discoveries of others. It had a number of R&D labs around the world.
Now, with Nortel's demise, it could pursue a bigger prize than market share:
technical mastery. And respect.
The head of research at Nortel's lab in Ottawa, #Wen#Tong, grew up in China and joined Nortel's wireless lab in 1995 after earning a doctorate at Concordia University in Montreal.
He had contributed to every generation of mobile technology and held 470 patents in the US.
If telecommunications companies staged a research scientist draft in 2009, Wen Tong would have been a first-round pick.
Now he was a free agent, and Google, Intel, and others courted him.
Tong picked Huawei. He wanted to keep his networking scientists together, and the team didn't want to leave Canada.
The Chinese company was happy to recruit the group and let them stay in place.
Huawei also promised them freedom to attack the signature challenge for networking science in the 21st century:
creating the infrastructure for #5G.
In this iteration of mobile platforms, billions of mobile devices would seamlessly connect to networks. It promised to transform the world in ways even the scientists could not imagine, and it would mean vast fortunes for those who produced the technology.
The race for #patents would be intense, a matter not only of profit but also national pride.
Not long after Tong joined Huawei, in 2009, a research paper came to his attention.
Tong had helped produce the technology that provided the radio-transmission error correction for the current standard, known as turbo codes.
He thought the polar codes concept could be its replacement in 5G.
But the obstacles were considerable, and Tong originally couldn't interest his Canadian researchers in attacking the problem.
Then, in 2012, Huawei asked Tong to restructure its communications lab in China.
He took the opportunity to assign several smart young engineers to work on polar codes.
It involved the none-too-certain process of taking a mathematical theory and making it actually work in practical design, but they made progress and the team grew.
With each innovation, Huawei rushed to the patent office.
In 2013, Wen Tong asked Huawei's investment board for $600 million for 5G research.
“Very simple,” Tong says. “20 minutes, and they decided.”
The answer was yes, and a good deal of that money went into polar codes.
After Huawei came up with software that implemented the theory, the work shifted to testing and iterating. Eventually hundreds of engineers were involved.
Tong was not the only information scientist who had seen Arıkan's paper. #Alexander#Vardy of the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego says the paper achieved “something that people were trying to do for 60 years.”
The challenge was that polar codes were not suited for 5G's short blocklengths
—the amount of 0s and 1s strung together.
Vardy and his postdoc, #Ido#Tal of the #Technion-Israel Institute of Technology, modified the error-correcting technology so it outperformed other state-of-the-art codes when applied to 5G's short blocklengths.
Vardy says he presented his findings in a conference in 2011.
“Huawei was there in the audience, and right after that they ran with it,” he says, seemingly without rancor.
(UC San Diego owns Vardy and Tal's patent and has licensed it to Samsung on a nonexclusive basis.)
Today Huawei holds more than two-thirds of the polar code patent “families”
—10 times as many as its nearest competitor.
The general feeling in the field, Vardy said, was that Huawei “invested a lot of research time and effort into developing this idea.”
It seemed “all the other companies were at least a few years behind.”
But all that work and all those patents would be wasted if the technology didn't fit into the 5G platform.
“It has to be adopted by everybody,” Tong says.
“You have to convince the entire industry that this is good for 5G.”
If polar codes were to be the symbol of Huawei's superiority, there was one more hurdle:
“I had the responsibility,” Wen Tong says, “to make it a standard.”
In 2009, a Turkish graduate of the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, #Erdal#Arikan, published a paper that solved a fundamental problem in information theory, allowing for much faster and more accurate data transfers.
Unable to get an academic appointment or funding to work on this seemingly esoteric problem in the United States, he returned to his home country.
As a foreign citizen, he would have had to find a U.S. employer interested in his project to be able to stay.
Back in Turkey, Arikan turned to #China.
It turned out that Arikan’s insight was the breakthrough needed to leap from 4G telecommunications networks to much faster #5G mobile internet services.
Four years later, China’s national telecommunications champion, #Huawei, was using Arikan’s discovery to invent some of the first 5G technologies.
Today, Huawei holds over two-thirds of the #patents related to Arikan’s solution
—10 times more than its nearest competitor.
And while Huawei has produced one-third of the 5G infrastructure now operating around the world, 💥the United States does not have a single major company competing in this race. 💥
Had the United States been able to retain Arikan
—simply by allowing him to stay in the country instead of making his visa contingent on immediately finding a sponsor for his work
—this history might well have been different.
After being kneecapped by a #patents troll years ago, #Mozilla Location Services, the only somewhat trusted (non-Google/Apple) "Wi-Fi positioning system" (geolocation based on triangulating collected #WiFi SSIDs), is now shutting down: https://github.com/mozilla/ichnaea/issues/2065
MLS was how #GeoClue could get a meters-accurate location without a #GPS receiver / sky line-of-sight.
It was used by many #GNOME / #KDE apps to get instantaneous neighborhood-level location (for maps, local weather…) on #Linux laptops.
The issue of the extent to which UPC local divisions would hear counterclaims for revocation in infringement cases, or refer the counterclaim to the central division (bifurcation), as well as to the extent different local divisions would diverge, was widely discussed before the UPC commenced operations. The picture emerging from early orders is that parties generally agree on what they want, and the court orders it!
This is a cautionary tale from the UPC - a last-minute request for extension of time to file a defence was rejected. This will leave the revocation action uncontested unless the patentee can successfully appeal.
Out of 6 languages recommended by the NSA, 4 are patended bvy multibillion comanies who can pull the plug on them at any time (and Oracle already tried that).
C# - PATENTED by Microsoft,
Go - PATENTED by Google
Java - PATENTED by Oracle, NOT FREE
Python - not too shabby
Rust - not too shabby
Swift - PATENTED by Apple
USPTO issues "Updated Guidance for Making a Proper Determination of Obviousness," in order "to provide a review of the flexible approach to determining obviousness that is required by KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc." (a decision SCOTUS issued in 2007): https://content.govdelivery.com/accounts/USPTO/bulletins/38c092c
A disappointing judgment from the UPC Court of Appeal, ruling that the act of requesting access to a document filed at the Court requires representation by a UPC Representative. It will be onerous for journalists, for example, to have to instruct a UPC Representative to get to even ask to see a document, such as a statement of claim or defence. Does the UPC really want to lack transparency to this extent? (short post by me)
TL;DR: The USPTO has clarified that AI models cannot be listed as inventors on patents. Only humans who substantially contribute to the invention can be named as inventors. This decision aligns with existing statutes, court decisions, and the Executive Order on AI by President Biden.
Defendant (Swedish) in UPC infringement action brought by Israeli company succeeds in getting language of proceedings changed from German to English. The UPC is really promoting the use of English as the default language. By my colleague Sebastian Fuchs.