Posts Tagged: "technology"

On July 7, 2023, Administrative Law Judge Cameron Elliot issued a Notice of Initial Determination in favor of computer and graphics processor maker AMD. See In the Matter of Certain Graphics Systems, Components Thereof, and Digital Televisions Containing the Same (No. 337-TA-1318). This puts AMD one step closer to preventing TCL and Realtek from importing smart TVs and components containing infringing graphics processors in its patent infringement case at the International Trade Commission (ITC).

On Friday, July 28, President Biden announced a new Executive Order titled “Federal Research and Development in Support of Domestic Manufacturing and United States Jobs.” Rumors that the Administration was considering extending the deeply flawed Department of Energy (DOE) policy (see “More DOE Bureaucracy Equals Less Innovation” to all agencies had been swirling for months. Luckily, the new Executive Order doesn’t do that, but how it will be applied is subject to a convoluted interagency process, so it will be months before we see if it’s meeting its intended goal or not.

This week in Washington IP news, even though Congress is not in session, there are still some interesting events taking place in Washington, DC. The Brookings Institution holds a talk on the state of the global economy, and the Hudson Institute hosts a conversation on China with a former national security advisor. Elsewhere, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) celebrates the LGBTQIA+ community’s contributions to the economy.

Reports of the death of the movies at the hands of IP have been greatly exaggerated. Movie ticket sales are down and may never recover from pre-pandemic highs. The actors and writers strike will not help but the scarcity of new product might. The studios are racing to screen franchise movies that put people back into theater seats. IP rights associated with franchises – Spider-Man, Iron Man, the Avengers, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, Mission Impossible – are being blamed for turning the movies into a veritable video game more focused on effects than people.

Today, the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) published a white paper titled Innovation Wars: How China Is Gaining on the United States in Corporate R&D showing that, while the United States continues to enjoy a lead in several key sectors when surveying the world’s largest corporate investors in research and development (R&D), its largest economic rival is gaining and could achieve parity with the U.S. in about a decade.

The House of Representatives’ Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property and the Internet met today to hear from a number of witnesses about the intersection of intellectual property rights and consumers’ right to repair products they own. The concerns voiced by witnesses and congress members today centered around harm and cost to consumers as a result of technological protection measures (TPMs) and increased use of IP tools such as design patents to thwart competition for after-market parts.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit yesterday upheld a district court ruling that embedding images from Instagram posts in third-party websites does not constitute copyright infringement. The case has to do with two photographers’ images that were embedded and posted with articles run by Buzzfeed News and Time from the photographers’ public Instagram accounts. The district court and the Ninth Circuit both cited Perfect 10 v. Amazon as precluding relief.

In a precedential decision authored by Judge Tiffany Cunningham on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) ruled that two patents for methods of connecting users based on their answers to polling questions were directed to patent ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. U.S. Patent Nos. 9,087,321 and 10,936,685 are owned by Trinity Info Media, LLC and are titled “Poll-Based Networking System.” The U.S. District court for the Central District of California granted Covalent, Inc.’s motion to dismiss under Rule 12(b)(6), finding that the claims were directed to the abstract idea of “matching users who gave corresponding answers to a question” and did not contain an inventive concept.

The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on the Judiciary yesterday held a hearing featuring Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Chair Lina Khan, who has recently come under fire from the Republican-led House leadership. Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) repeatedly grilled Khan about testimony from the independent assessor for Twitter, Ernst & Young, in the Commission’s recent investigation into the social media platform, which Jordan characterized as “targeted harrassment.”

On July 12, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Intellectual Property held its second hearing in two months on the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) developments and intellectual property rights. This most recent hearing focused on potential violations of copyright law by generative AI platforms, the impact of those platforms on human creators, and ways in which AI companies can implement technological solutions to protect copyright owners and consumers alike.

Last week, comedian Sarah Silverman and authors Christopher Golden and Richard Kadrey sued OpenAI in a U.S. district court, alleging the company’s generative AI product, ChatGPT, infringes on their copyrighted content. In addition to copyright infringement, the trio also claimed that the AI company violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), unfair competition laws and unjustly enriched the company. The lawsuit accuses OpenAI of “copying massive amounts of text” used to train ChatGPT to produce new text from prompts. Language models like OpenAI rely on datasets of text or other media to train its generative capabilities.

On July 11, the Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP), released a policy report advocating for a pro-innovation legislative and administrative agenda to counteract a series of shocks to the U.S. patent system over the past two decades. This pro-innovation agenda has the direct support of several C4IP members who formerly held high-ranking government positions and are now calling on the federal government to correct several areas of patent law that have improperly tilted the playing field in favor of corporate infringers and foreign counterfeiters.

“The true crime in ecommerce fraud is that creators will stop creating.” That grim assessment has driven Jennifer L. Cook of SnakeArts to fight like heck against rampant infringements and counterfeits globally. Her ongoing class action lawsuit against Meta Platforms claims their subsidiary Facebook knowingly permits copyright infringement via advertisements featuring stolen product images from artists. It seems to be in Meta’s best interest to do so: FB generates the bulk of its billions of dollars in annual revenue from advertisements, without regard to the legitimacy of content.

In April, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) requested public input on an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). The Request for Comments (RFC) allowed the public to voice their opinion on the proposed rules, including hundreds of real, authentic inventors. In the past, US Inventor has asked its members to use their voices and write comments for the USPTO’s requests. Typically, these requests generate at least 100 responses from USI’s members. This time, USI decided to level the playing field and give its members a chance to speak as loudly as its adversaries. We generated nearly 2,400 real comments from inventors, patent holders and concerned individuals. 

On Wednesday, July 5, the United Kingdom Intellectual Property Office (UKIPO) released a summary of the responses it has received to its request for views on whether the country’s system for standard essential patents (SEP) is functioning properly. The goal of the request for comments and the subsequent report is to determine whether the UK government needs to make policy changes in this area. The Office received comments on a variety of topics related to SEPs, including the balance of the system, competition, transparency, patent litigation, and more. While both SEP holders and implementers reported problems in the system, the UKIPO found that there was little consensus among stakeholders as to the efficiency of the system and whether government intervention was needed.