The vaccine manufacturer Moderna sued Pfizer and BioNTech on Friday, claiming that its rivals' Covid-19 shot violates its patents protecting its groundbreaking technology. NPR reports: The lawsuit alleges the two companies used certain key features of technology Moderna developed to make their COVID-19 vaccine. It argues that Pfizer and BioNtech's vaccine infringes patents Moderna filed between 2010 and 2016 for its messenger RNA or mRNA technology.

All three companies' COVID-19 vaccines used mRNA technology which is a new way to make vaccines. In the past, vaccines were generally made using parts of a virus, or inactivated virus, to stimulate an immune response. With mRNA technology, the vaccine uses messenger RNA created in a lab to send genetic instructions that teach our cells to make a protein or part of a protein that triggers an immune response. In October 2020, Moderna pledged not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents while the pandemic was ongoing, according to a statement from the company. In March this year, it said it will stick to its commitment not to enforce its COVID-19 related patents in low and middle-income countries, but expects rival companies like Pfizer to respect its intellectual property.

In two lawsuits (PDF) filed today in California, Google alleges that Sonos' latest voice-assistant technology violates seven patents related to Google Assistant. CNET reports: Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said Sonos has "started an aggressive and misleading campaign against our products, at the expense of our shared customers." As a result, he said, the lawsuits have been filed to "defend our technology and challenge Sonos' clear, continued infringement of our patents." Sonos launched its own voice assistant in June, allowing customers to control their speakers using voice commands starting with the phrase "Hey Sonos."

Google said in the lawsuits that it has made its technologies available to users across the globe, "even providing its Google Assistant software to Sonos for many years." The suits also said Google has for years worked with Sonos engineers on the "implementation of voice recognition and voice-activated device controls in Sonos' products." Google requests an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an injunction blocking Sonos' alleged infringement. Last year, the International Trade Commission ruled that Google infringed on five patents owned by Sonos, forcing Google to change the way its smart speakers are set up and controlled.

"Google previously sued us all over the world and Sonos has prevailed in every decided case," Eddie Lazarus, Sonos' chief legal officer, told CNET, adding that the new lawsuits "are an intimidation tactic designed to retaliate against Sonos for speaking out against Google's monopolistic practices," which "will not succeed."

Computer scientist Stephen Thaler was dealt another blow in his battle for artificial intelligence machines to be recognized as inventors on patents, after the nation's top patent court found that inventors must be humans. The term "individual" in the Patent Act refers only to humans, meaning an AI doesn't count as an inventor on a patentable invention, the US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday. From a report: The decision lines up with courts in the European Union, the United Kingdom, and Australia that have refused to accept Thaler's argument. His only currently existing win is from a South African court that said an AI can be a patent inventor. Unless the US Supreme Court steps in, the Federal Circuit is typically the final authority on US patent matters -- hearing all such appeals from federal district courts and the US Patent and Trademark Office. Thaler already plans to appeal to the high court, his attorney, Ryan Abbott of Brown, Neri, Smith & Khan LLP, said. The Federal Circuit adopted a "narrow and textualist approach" to the Patent Act, Abbott said. "It ignores the purpose of the Patent Act and the outcome that AI-generated inventions are now unpatentable in the United States," he said. "That is an outcome with real negative social consequences."

waspleg writes: Fedora, the popular Linux distribution, will no longer incorporate software licensed under CC0, the Creative Commons "No Rights Reserved" license. In order to support the wide re-use of copyrighted content in new works, CC0 provides authors "a way to waive all their copyright and related rights in their works to the fullest extent allowed by law." The license arose in response to the 1998 Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which extended the duration of copyright by 20 years at the expense of the public domain. But CC0 explicitly says the licensor does not waive patent rights, which for free and open source software (FOSS) is a potential problem. That means, for instance as described here, if you use CC0-licensed code in your project, and the author of that code later claims your project is infringing a patent they own regarding that code, your defense will be limited. Avoiding the use of CC0-licensed code is one way to steer clear of these so-called submarine patents that could years later torpedo you.

In a message to The Fedora Project's mailing list for legal issues, Richard Fontana, a technology lawyer for Red Hat (which sponsors Fedora), explained that while CC0 is cited as a "good license," it won't be for much longer. "We plan to classify CC0 as allowed-content only, so that CC0 would no longer be allowed for code," said Fontana. "This is a fairly unusual change and may have an impact on a nontrivial number of Fedora packages (that is not clear to me right now), and we may grant a carveout for existing packages that include CC0-covered code." Fontana said there's a growing consensus in the FOSS community that licenses without any form of patent licensing or forbearance aren't suitable. CC0, he said, like other Creative Commons licenses, includes a clause that explicitly states no patent rights are waived by the licensor.

A joint investigation by Nikkei and a Tokyo analytics company found that Apple has jumped into automobile-related technologies, as shown by the company's recent patent applications. From a report: Apple has filed patents in self-driving and other vehicle software as well as in hardware related to riding comfort, such as seats and suspension. The U.S. tech and services company is also targeting vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technology, which allows cars to communicate with each other and connect to the "Internet of Things," moves seen as a major push by Apple to build its own platform and join a growing industry shift from just cars to overall mobility.

Nikkei and Intellectual Property Landscape found that as of June 1, Apple applied for and published 248 automobile-related patents after 2000. It typically takes about 18 months after filing a patent for it to be published. While most of Apple's applications in 2021 have yet to be published, eight were. This number is bound to increase throughout the year. Of Apple's 27 applications made in 2020, five were published at the same time in 2021. The number of patents published in 2021 is almost certain to exceed this, according to Intellectual Property Landscape.

"5G iPhones have been slapped with a sales ban in Colombia," reports Digital Trends, "due to a 5G patent infringement dispute between Apple and Ericsson... The ban affects the latest models, including the iPhone 12, iPhone 13, and the iPad Pro, which the court found infringed Ericsson's patent pertaining to 5G tech."

They add that in response Apple is now suing Ericsson in Texas, "for damages that resulted from the ruling in Colombia, as well as any fines, fees, penalties, and costs that have been incurred because of it."

The site FOSS Patents notes that Colombia reached the "banning" stage less than six months after the beginning of "the current wave of Ericsson v. Apple patent infringement actions." ZDNet explains: The backstory here is somewhat complicated but can be boiled down to the following points:

- Apple used to pay Ericsson royalty fees for patented 5G technologies.
- Apple failed to renew the licenses when they expired.
- Ericsson sued Apple.
- Apple then sued Ericsson, claiming that the company was violating FRAND rules, the patents were standard-essential patents, and Ericsson's licensing fees were too high.

There followed a whole bunch of legal actions and counteractions, with both companies attempting to get sales bans on the other company's hardware....

This ban is likely no big deal for Apple given the small size of that market. The problem is several more lawsuits are making their way through various courts in various territories. And since Apple isn't disputing the validity of the patents, it's almost certainly opening itself out to bans being enforced in other countries.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fermion for sharing the news!

EU antitrust regulators are investigating the video licensing policy of the Alliance for Open Media (AOM), whose members include Alphabet Google, Amazon, Apple and Meta , the European Commission said on Thursday. Reuters reports: Founded in 2015, the group aims to create a new standard software for streaming higher-quality 4K video on browsers, devices, apps, and gaming, known as AV1. While the AV1 software is not yet adopted widely, Netflix and YouTube have started using it for some customers, and browsers such as Google Chrome and Firefox have started to support the new format. Intel, Huawei, Mozilla, Samsung and Nvidia are also AOM members, according to its website.

In a questionnaire sent to some companies earlier this year and seen by Reuters, the EU watchdog said it was investigating alleged anti-competitive behavior related to the license terms of AV1 by AOM and its members in Europe. "The Commission has information that AOM and its members may be imposing licensing terms (mandatory royalty-free cross licensing) on innovators that were not a part of AOM at the time of the creation of the AV1 technical, but whose patents are deemed essential to (its) technical specifications," the paper said. It said this action may be restricting the innovators' ability to compete with the AV1 technical specification, and also eliminate incentives for them to innovate.

The questionnaire also asked about the impact of an AOM patent license clause in which licensees would have their patent licenses terminated immediately if they launched patent lawsuits asserting that implementation infringes their claims. Companies risk fines of up to 10% of their global turnover for breaching EU antitrust rules.

The UK's Intellectual Property Office has decided artificial-intelligence systems cannot patent inventions for the time being. The BBC reports: A recent IPO consultation found many experts doubted AI was currently able to invent without human assistance. Current law allowed humans to patent inventions made with AI assistance, the government said, despite "misperceptions" this was not the case. Last year, the Court of Appeal ruled against Stephen Thaler, who had said his Dabus AI system should be recognized as the inventor in two patent applications, for: a food container [and] a flashing light. The judges sided, by a two-to-one majority, with the IPO, which had told him to list a real person as the inventor. "Only a person can have rights - a machine cannot," wrote Lady Justice Laing in her judgement. "A patent is a statutory right and it can only be granted to a person." But the IPO also said it would "need to understand how our IP system should protect AI-devised inventions in the future" and committed to advancing international discussions, with a view to keeping the UK competitive.

Many AI systems are trained on large amounts of data copied from the internet. And, on Tuesday, the IPO also announced plans to change copyright law to allow anyone with lawful access - rather than only those conducting non-commercial research, as now -- to do this, to "promote the use of AI technology, and wider 'data mining' techniques, for the public good." Rights holders will still be able to control and charge for access to their works but no longer charge extra for the ability to mine them.

In the consultation, the IPO noted the UK was one of only a handful of countries to protect computer-generated works with no human creator. The "author" of a "computer-generated work" is defined as "the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken," it says. And protection lasts for 50 years from when the work is made. Performing-arts workers' union Equity had called for copyright law to be changed to protect actors' livelihoods from AI content such as "deepfakes," generated from images of their face or voice. The IPO took this issue seriously, it said, but "at this stage, the impacts of AI technologies on performers remain unclear." "We will keep these issues under review," it added.

The Supreme Court declined Apple's bid for a hearing over two Qualcomm patents (US Patent No. 7,844,037 and US Patent No. 8,683,362) that were part of lawsuits filed in 2017, claiming infringement by Apple's iPhones, iPads, and Apple Watches. The Verge reports: Reuters points out that Apple and Qualcomm's 2019 settlement of a worldwide legal battle over patents largely ended the squabbling in favor of a six-year licensing agreement but allowed a case in front of the Patent and Trademark Office's Patent Trial and Appeal Board to continue. There, Apple argued the two patents should be invalid, but the board ruled in Qualcomm's favor. Last April, the Federal Circuit court rejected Apple's request for an appeal based on the 2019 settlement covering thousands of patents, including those two. At the time, Apple argued that its royalty payments and risk of being sued again were reasons for a hearing.

In its appeal to the Supreme Court (pdf), Apple argued that Qualcomm might use the patents in a lawsuit again once the license expires in 2025 or in 2027 if it's extended. The Department of Justice under the Biden administration submitted an amicus brief rejecting those arguments in May and asked the Supreme Court to deny Apple's request. Now that it has, we'll probably have to wait until that license agreement eventually expires to know what will happen next.

Female scientists are less likely to receive authorship credit or to be named on patents related to the work they do compared with their male counterparts -- including in fields such as healthcare, where women dominate -- data suggests. From a report: This gender gap may help to explain well-documented disparities in the apparent contributions of male and female scientists -- such as that of Rosalind Franklin, whose pivotal contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA initially went unrecognised because she was not cited on the core Nature article by James Watson and Francis Crick.

"We have known for a long time that women publish and patent at a lower rate than men. But, because previous data never showed who participated in research, no one knew why," said Prof Julia Lane at New York University in the US, who led the new research. Lane and her colleagues analysed administrative data on research projects conducted at 52 US colleges and universities between 2013 and 2016. They matched information about 128,859 scientists to 39,426 journal articles and 7,675 patents, looking at which people who worked on individual projects received credit and which did not.

schwit1 writes: The Ohio State University has successfully trademarked the word "THE," in a victory for the college and its branding that is sure to produce eye rolls from Michigan fans and other rivals. Stating the full name of the school has become a point of pride for Ohio State's athletes when introducing themselves on television during games. The three-letter article "THE" has also become an important part of the school's merchandise and apparel. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office approved Ohio State's application Tuesday. The trademark applies to T-shirts, baseball caps and hats.

"'THE' has been a rallying cry in the Ohio State community for many years," said Benjamin Johnson, a spokesman for the university. Ohio State registered the word as a trademark to protect the university's brand, Mr. Johnson said. Ohio State's trademark and licensing program makes about $12.5 million annually for the university, which funds student scholarships and university programs, he said. "Universities historically are very particular about their trademarks, and they go to a lot of lengths to enforce their trademarks," said Josh Gerben, a trademark attorney, who noted Ohio State's trademark application on Twitter. "There is a lot of value in a university's brand."

RED filed a lawsuit yesterday suing (PDF) Nikon for infringing on its video compression patents. PetaPixel reports: The lawsuit was filed in a southern California federal court today and asserts that the Japanese camera manufacturer and its United States subsidiaries have illegally infringed on seven patents that deal specifically with "a video camera that can be configured to highly compress video data in a visually lossless manner."

In the filing, RED notes a type of compression that it says it has patented and is in use by Nikon in the Z9: "The camera can be configured to transform blue and red image data in a manner that enhances the compressibility of the data. The data can then be compressed and stored in this form. This allows a user to reconstruct the red and blue data to obtain the original raw data for a modified version of the original raw data that is visually lossless when demosaiced. Additionally, the data can be processed so the green image elements are demosaiced first, and then the red and blue elements are reconstructed based on values of the demosaiced green image elements."

This compression comes thanks to a partnership with intoPIX's TicoRAW which was announced last December. [...] The TicoRAW feature has been in the news for months, but RED was likely waiting for it to be implemented into a competitor's camera before filing a lawsuit. RED's lawsuit says Nikon's infringement on its patent was "willful" and claims Nikon would have known about RED's patents. [...] RED then cites multiple lawsuits it has filed against Kinefinity, Sony, and Nokia over the years. RED is seeking damages or royalties for the infringement as well as an injunction to ban Nikon from further infringing.

Meta Platforms built its industry-leading virtual reality headset by infringing Immersion's patents, the smaller company alleged in a lawsuit. From a report: The Meta Quest 2, which dominates the market, infringes six patents covering haptic technology, Immersion said in a complaint filed Thursday in federal court in Waco, Texas. In video game systems and controllers, haptics allow users to experience vibrations that mimic real-life forces -- such as blocking a punch in a virtual boxing game. Meta Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg has committed to spending $10 billion a year to bring to life his vision of a virtual reality-enabled metaverse. Sales of Meta Quest 2 hit 8.7 million units in 2021, twice as much as in the prior year, and the company owns 80% of the market.

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Remember that patent lawsuit filed against GNOME's Shotwell in 2019? An enterprising open source lawyer has challenged it within the patent office and gotten the whole thing canceled!
OpenSource.org argues that decision by the U.S. patent office "may well give patent trolls cause to steer clear of open source projects — even more than the fierce resistance the community impressively funded and mounted in the GNOME case." Of the many methods developed over the past 20 years to eliminate patent threats against FOSS, none is as powerful as challenging the nefarious patents directly. That's what McCoy Smith, founder of OSI sponsor LexPan Law, did.... Smith pointed out in a re-examination request to the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office that the patent was not for any new invention.

They agreed. As a result, all of these "claims" in the Rothschild '086 Patent — the part of a patent describing what the patent rights cover — have consequently been canceled. The Rothschild '086 patent can no longer be used against any victim, including open source projects.

Of course, that's little comfort to the 20+ victims attacked after GNOME with the now-proven-worthless Rothschild '086 patent, or the 50+ companies targeted with related patents that haven't yet been re-examined.... Still, it's good to know there are open source champions of all sizes defending the development of open software.

After Dell's new Compression Attached Memory Module (CAMM) leaked out last week, several tech sites led many to believe that the company was taking a path to "lock out users upgrades." However, according to PCWorld citing both the person who designed and patented the CAMM standard, as well as the product manager of the first Dell Precision laptop to feature it, "the intent of the new memory module standard is to head-off looming bandwidth ceilings in the current SO-DIMM designs." They claim that CAMM could increase performance, improve reliability, aid user upgrades, and eventually lower costs too. From the report: Most of the internet hot takes last week, however, reacted to CAMM being proprietary, which is typically viewed as a method to lock people into buying upgrades only from one company. Dell officials, however, insist that's not the case at all. "One of the tenants of the PC industry is standards," said Dell's Tom Schnell, the Senior Distinguished Engineer who designed much of it. "We believe in that; we put standards into our products. We're not keeping it to ourselves, we hope it becomes the next industry standard."

Schnell said that Dell isn't making the modules and has worked with memory companies as well as Intel on this. In the future, a person with a CAMM-equipped laptop will be able to buy RAM from any third party and install it in the laptop. Yes, initially, Dell will likely be the only place to get CAMM upgrades, but that should change as the standard scales up and is adopted by other PC makers. The new memory modules are also built using commodity DRAMs just like conventional SO-DIMMs.

In fact, Dell points out, it's not even "proprietary" on its own laptops. The first Precision workstations that come with CAMM will also eventually be offered with conventional SO-DIMMs using an interposer. Mano Gialusis, product manager for Precision workstations, said the interposer option goes into the same CAMM mount, too. With CAMM now a reality, Dell's next step is to get it in front of JEDEC, the memory standards organization, to make it available to others, he said. Why not create a standard from scratch? Schnell said its far easier to get a standard minted once it's proven to work rather than trying to simply create something anew every time. The report goes on to say that Dell does hold patents on the CAMM design "and there will be royalties," but "no standard can go forward through JEDEC unless the licensing is not anti-competitive, is reasonably priced, and cannot discriminate against a company."

A writer for The Drive reports that "Recently, I noticed a part that I made for my Honda Accord was removed from Printables, the newly rebranded 3D printing repository offered by Prusa.

"There seemed to be no rhyme or reason for it, but I didn't think anything else about it...until reports of a mass deletion started popping up on Reddit." All models referencing the word "Honda" posted prior to March 30, 2022, were seemingly removed from Printables without warning. These included speaker brackets, key housings, hood latches, shifter bushings, washer fluid caps, roof latch handles, and my trunk lid handle — a part not offered on 10th generation Accords sold in the U.S. at all. In fact, many of the removed parts had no Honda branding but were just compatible with Honda vehicles. As it turns out, Prusa says it was issued a takedown notice from Honda and removed all 3D models that referenced the brand.

"I can confirm to you that we have received a letter from a lawyer representing Honda, informing us that we were required to remove any model which used 'Honda' in the listing, the model itself, or one of several trademarks/logos also associated with Honda," a Prusa spokesperson told The Drive in an email. "This will also be related to the naming of the files it self (sic), as for Honda this would be considered as a violation of their trademark/patents." A Prusa employee responded to a post on the company's forums, noting that Honda sent a "huge legal document" that covered every model that the company wished to have deleted. The document reportedly included items that did not have Honda logos, but also specific items with certain shapes and dimensions — like a washer fluid reservoir cap, for example.

A response from another employee was posted suggesting other sites that host 3D models were also sent a similar takedown notice.

Back in 1987 Alexander Trevor worked with the GIF format's creator, Steve Wilhite, at CompuServe. 35 years later Fast Company tech editor Harry McCracken (also Slashdot reader harrymcc) located Trevor for the inside story: Wilhite did not come up with the GIF format in order to launch a billion memes. It was 1987, and he was a software engineer at CompuServe, the most important online service until an upstart called America Online took off in the 1990s. And he developed the format in response to a request from CompuServe executive Alexander "Sandy" Trevor. (Trevor's most legendary contribution to CompuServe was not instigating GIF: He also invented the service's CB Simulator — the first consumer chat rooms and one of the earliest manifestation of social networking, period. That one he coded himself as a weekend project in 1980.)

GIF came to be because online services such as CompuServe were getting more graphical, but the computer makers of the time — such as Apple, Commodore, and IBM — all had their own proprietary image types. "We didn't want to have to put up images in 79 different formats," explains Trevor. CompuServe needed one universal graphics format.

Even though the World Wide Web and digital cameras were still in the future, work was already underway on the image format that came to be known as JPEG. But it wasn't optimized for CompuServe's needs: For example, stock charts and weather graphics didn't render crisply. So Trevor asked Wilhite to create an image file type that looked good and downloaded quickly at a time when a 2,400 bits-per-second dial-up modem was considered torrid. Reading a technical journal, Wilhite came across a discussion of an efficient compression technique known as LZW for its creators — Abraham Limpel, Jacob Ziv, and Terry Welch. It turned out to be an ideal foundation for what CompuServe was trying to build, and allowed GIF to pack a lot of image information into as few bytes as possible. (Much later, computing giant Unisys, which gained a patent for LZW, threatened companies that used it with lawsuits, leading to a licensing agreement with CompuServe and the creation of the patent-free PNG image format.)

GIF officially debuted on June 15, 1987. "It met my requirements, and it was extremely useful for CompuServe," says Trevor....

GIF was also versatile, offering the ability to store the multiple pictures that made it handy for creating mini-movies as well as static images. And it spread beyond CompuServe, showing up in Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and then in Netscape Navigator. The latter browser gave GIFs the ability to run in an infinite loop, a crucial feature that only added to their hypnotic quality. Seeing cartoon hamsters dance for a split second is no big whoop, but watching them shake their booties endlessly was just one of many cultural moments that GIFs have given us.

Russia has effectively legalized patent theft from anyone affiliated with countries "unfriendly" to it, declaring that unauthorized use will not be compensated. The Washington Post reports: The decree, issued this week, illustrates the economic war waged around Russia's invasion of Ukraine, as the West levies sanctions and pulls away from Russia's huge oil and gas industry. Russian officials have also raised the possibility of lifting restrictions on some trademarks, according to state media, which could allow continued use of brands such as McDonald's that are withdrawing from Russia in droves. The effect of losing patent protections will vary by company, experts say, depending on whether they have a valuable patent in Russia. The U.S. government has long warned of intellectual property rights violations in the country; last year Russia was among nine nations on a "priority watch list" for alleged failures to protect intellectual property. Now Russian entities could not be sued for damages if they use certain patents without permission.

The patent decree and any further lifting of intellectual property protections could affect Western investment in Russia well beyond any de-escalation of the war in Ukraine, said Josh Gerben, an intellectual property lawyer in Washington. Firms that already saw risks in Russian business would have more reason to worry. "It's just another example of how [Putin] has forever changed the relationship that Russia will have with the world," Gerben said. Russia's decree removes protections for patent holders who are registered in hostile countries, do business in them or hold their nationality.

The Kremlin has not issued any decree lifting protections on trademarks. But Russia's Ministry of Economic Development said last week that authorities are considering "removing restrictions on the use of intellectual property contained in certain goods whose supply to Russia is restricted," according to Russian state news outlet Tass, and that potential measures could affect inventions, computer programs and trademarks. The ministry said the measures would "mitigate the impact on the market of supply chain breaks, as well as shortages of goods and services that have arisen due to the new sanctions of western countries," Tass stated. Gerben said a similar decree on trademarks would pave the way for Russian companies to exploit American brand names that have halted their business in Russia. He gave a hypothetical involving McDonald's, one of the latest global giants to suspend operations in Russia under public pressure.

For the last two years, Unified Patents, an international organization of over 200 businesses, has been winning the battle against patent trolls "to keep them from stealing from the companies and organizations that actually use patents' intellectual property (IP)," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan Nichols. "This is their story to date." From the report: Unified Patents brings the fight to the trolls. It deters patent trolls from attacking its members by making it too expensive for the troll to win. The group does this by examining troll patents and their activities in various technology sectors (Zones). The United Patents Open Source Software Zone (OSS Zone) is the newest of these Zones. [...] Even before OSS Zone was formally launched, Unified Patents along with the Open Invention Network (OIN), the world's largest patent non-aggression group, launched legal cases against poor quality PAE-owned (Patent Assertion Entities) patents. The Linux Foundation and Microsoft have also joined the OSS Zone to battle these bad patents. [...]

Together, United Patents uses open-source software evidence as proof to establish that the trolls often don't have a case. This is done using Inter Partes Review (IPR), a 2012 legal tool for showing that a bad patent never should have been granted in the first place. [Linux Foundation Executive Director Jim Zemlin] notes, "The Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB)'s discretionary rulings on IPRs have changed the landscape around NPEs. These cases take a long time to be resolved. Typically, it takes from 12 to 24 months. That also makes them expensive for both the OSS Zone and the trolls. Keith Bergelt, the OIN's CEO, said "In other technology areas when patents go through the IPR process or are reexamined, there is a settlement around 20% of the time. In the OSS Zone, there are few settlements. This makes it more costly and difficult to administer, but also is difficult on the PAEs. When the success rate against their patents is over 95%, certain PAEs that would otherwise hope to settle have essentially given up on defending their patents." Still, with such a high success rate, it's worth the expense.

To date, Unified has overseen and managed 43 challenges. Of these, 12 patents were found invalid, another 23 cases have been instituted, and six are still in process. This has led to multiple settlements for Unified Patents members. These, in turn directly pass through to OIN's 3,600+ community members. For example, an Accelerated Memory Tech patent 6,513,062, was used by the troll IP Investments Group to claim that the open-source Redis, which manages cache resources on the cloud, violated the patent. Redis, not having any money, IP Investments Group instead went after Hulu, Citrix Systems, Barracuda Networks, Kemp Technologies, and F5 Networks for their use of Redis software. IP Investments Group gave up rather than fighting it out. Everyone who uses Redis wins. It's one small victory, but that's how the patent troll wars are won. And, with the United Patents' high-success rate in knocking out bad patents, slowly but surely the patent trolls are being driven back from not only open-source software but all software.

There's won't be a big revival for BlackBerry phones anytime soon. OnwardMobility, the Austin-based startup that announced its plans to release a 5G BlackBerry device with a physical keyboard back in 2020, is shutting down. From a report: The company posted a notice of its closure on its website, making it clear that it won't be proceeding with the development of the smartphone. This comes a month after it responded to people asking about the status of the project with a blog post entitled "contrary to popular belief, we are not dead." While OnwardMobility didn't expound on the reason behind its closure, Android Police reported a few days ago that its license to use the BlackBerry name had been canceled. Apparently, BlackBerry wants to distance itself from its past as a smartphone manufacturer after it sold off its remaining mobile patents for $600 million in the beginning of February. OnwardMobility reportedly decided not to push through with the development of a new smartphone without the BlackBerry name, especially since it won't be easy entering the market with an ongoing global component shortage.