The U.S. Supreme Court stayed out of the debate over what types of medical diagnostic tests can be patented, leaving in legal limbo companies that discover ways to diagnose and treat diseases based on patients' unique characteristics. From a report: The justices rejected an appeal by Quest Diagnostics's Athena unit that sought to restore its patent for a test to detect the presence of an autoimmune disease. A lower court had ruled in favor of the nonprofit Mayo Clinic that the test wasn't eligible for a patent because it merely covered a natural law -- the correlation between the presence of an antibody and the disease. Justices on Monday also rejected appeals to clarify the rules regarding software patents. The Supreme Court's action leaves it to Congress to resolve an issue that's created a legal gray area for such discoveries.

U.S. trade regulators said on Friday they will investigate wearable monitoring devices, including those made by Fitbit and Garmin, following allegations of patent violations by rival Koninklijke Philips and its North America unit. Reuters reports: The U.S. International Trade Commission, in a statement, said the probe would also look at devices by made by California-based Ingram Micro as well as China-based Maintek Computer and Inventec Appliances. Netherlands-based Philips and Philips North America LLC, in their complaint, are calling for tariffs or an import ban and allege the other companies have infringed on Philips' patents or otherwise misappropriated its intellectual property. Although the USITC agreed to launch an investigation, it said it "has not yet made any decision on the merits of the case" and would make its determination "at the earliest practicable time." "We believe these claims are without merit and a result of Philips' failure to succeed in the wearables market," Fitbit said in a statement.

In a statement to The Verge, Philips said that the company had attempted to negotiate licensing agreements with Fitbit and Garmin for three years, but talks ultimately broke down. "Philips expects third parties to respect Philips' intellectual property in the same way as Philips respects the intellectual property rights of third parties," a spokesperson said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: SoftBank-backed Zume is laying off 360 employees, accounting for about 50 percent of its workforce, and shuttering its robotic pizza business to focus on food packaging. SoftBank invested $375 million in Zume in 2018, giving the start-up a $1 billion valuation. Previously, Zume was valued at just $218 million and had risen $71 million in total, according to Pitchbook. Like other SoftBank-backed startups, Zume used the capital to quickly scale and increase its workforce. But, over the last year, investors have shifted their focus from "growth at all costs" to a clearer path to profitability.

Zume CEO and founder Alex Garden tells CNBC that it's a difficult day for the startup, but the changes being made will focus the business on "the inventions that are showing strong commercial traction." Garden says the company is creating 100 open roles in the Source Packaging unit that employees can reapply for. Pizza Hut has been testing Zume's round boxes on a limited basis. Zume's packaging -- which the company says is covered by a number of patents -- is made of sustainably harvested plant fiber and is industrially compostable. The robot pizza company, which launched in 2015, consisted of an army of robot sauce-spreaders and trucks packed full of ovens. Garden's goal at the time was to become the "Amazon of food."

Audio company Sonos has sued Google for allegedly copying its patented speaker technology while undercutting it at market. From a report: The New York Times reports that it filed two lawsuits covering five patents on its wireless speaker design. Sonos is also asking for a sales ban on Google's laptops, phones, and speakers in the US through a separate case with the International Trade Commission. Sonos claims that Google stole its multiroom speaker technology after getting access to it through a 2013 partnership. The original partnership would let Sonos speakers support Google Play Music, but the company allegedly used patented technology in its now-discontinued Chromecast Audio device, then continued to use it in the Google Home lineup of smart speakers and the Pixel product lineup. Meanwhile, Sonos says Google subsidized its own products to sell them at a cheaper price while using them to extract more data from buyers.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Futurism: To protect its hosts, Airbnb is now using an AI-powered tool to scan the internet for clues that a guest might not be a reliable customer. According to patent documents reviewed by the Evening Standard, the tool takes into account everything from a user's criminal record to their social media posts to rate their likelihood of exhibiting "untrustworthy" traits -- including narcissism, Machiavellianism, and even psychopathy. The background check tool is the work of Trooly, a startup Airbnb acquired in 2017. When the Evening Standard asked Airbnb to comment on the extent to which it uses Trooly's tool, it declined. However, Airbnb's website does note the company's use of AI to rate potential guests: "Every Airbnb reservation is scored for risk before it's confirmed. We use predictive analytics and machine learning to instantly evaluate hundreds of signals that help us flag and investigate suspicious activity before it happens."

Bruce Perens (Slashdot reader #3872) co-founded the Open Source Initiative with Eric Raymond in 1998. But on Thursday Perens posted "it seems to me that the organization is rather enthusiastically headed toward accepting a license that isn't freedom respecting. Fine, do it without me, please.

"I asked Patrick to cancel my membership, and I would have unsubscribed from OSI lists, including this one, if your server was working..."

The issue is a new software license drafted by lawyer Van Lindberg called the Cryptographic Autonomy License (or CAL). Another open-source-community leader familiar with the debate -- who spoke with The Register on condition of anonymity -- claimed Lindberg lobbied OSI directors privately to green-light the license, contrary to an approval process that's supposed to be carried out in public.

"I don't think that's an appropriate characterization," said Lindberg, of law firm Dykema, in a phone interview with The Register. "I think there are number of people who from the beginning made up their minds about the Cryptographic Autonomy License. You'll see a lot of people jumping onto any pretext they can find in order to oppose it. With regard to this idea of lobbying, there have been procedural-type communications that I think are entirely reasonable," he added. "But all the substantive debate has been on the license review and license discussion forums...."

Perens said he resigned because the OSI appears to have already decided to accept the license. He said he's headed in a different direction, which he called "coherent open source."

"We've gone the wrong way with licensing," he said, citing the proliferation of software licenses. He believes just three are necessary, AGPLv3, the LGPLv3, and Apache v2.
Meanwhile, the Cryptographic Autonomy License is envisioned for use with the distributed development platform Holo, notes the Register: According to Holo co-founder Arthur Brock, distributed peer-to-peer software needs a license that addresses cryptographic key rights, which is why the Cryptographic Autonomy License has been proposed. "We are trying to say: the only valid way to use our code is if that developer's end-users are the sole authors and controllers of their own private crypto keys," he wrote in a post last year.

Lindberg said the Cryptographic Autonomy License is applicable to current web applications but it more meaningful in the context of distributed workloads and distributed computation, which he contends will become more important as people seek alternatives to the centralization of today's cloud-based systems. "A lot of people are very concerned about this concept of owning your data, owning your computer, having the ability to really control your computing experience and have it not be controlled by your cloud provider," said Lindberg.

Perens said, "It's a good goal but it means you now need to have a lawyer to understand the license and to respond to your users."
Slashdot asked Bruce Perens for details on "Coherent Open Source." Here's what he wrote back...

Apple will once again license technology from Imagination Technologies, the chip designer that used to provide graphics processors for the iPhone and iPad, the UK-based company announced today. The Verge reports: In a short statement posted on its website, Imagination said that it had entered into a multiyear license agreement with Apple, under which the Cupertino, California-based firm will have access to "a wider range of Imagination's intellectual property in exchange for license fees." Apple announced its split from Imagination back in April 2017 when it said that it would start designing its own graphics chips, and it would stop licensing the company's technology within two years. After the split was announced, Imagination expressed skepticism that Apple could design its own chips "without violating Imagination's patents, intellectual property, and confidential information."

Mike Masnick, writing for TechDirt: We've written a bunch about why AI generated artwork should not (and need not) have any copyright at all. The law says that copyright only applies to human creators. But what about patents? There has been a big debate about this in the patent space over the last year, mainly lead by AI developers who want to be able to secure patents on AI generated ideas. The patent offices in the EU and the US have been exploring the issue, and asking for feedback, while they plot out a strategy, but some AI folks decided to force the matter sooner. Over the summer they announced that they had filed for two patents in the EU for inventions that they claim were "invented" by an AI named DABUS without the assistance of a human inventor. And now, the EU Patent Office has rejected both patents, since they don't have a human inventor.

Tesla is closing the year by filing a patent on a new chemistry for better, longer-lasting and cheaper batteries. The new patent is related to the new battery cell that Tesla's battery research partner, Jeff Dahn, and his team at Dalhousie University unveiled earlier this year. The new cell "should be able to power an electric vehicle for over [1 million miles] and last at least two decades in grid energy storage," Dahn said in a paper released at the time. Electrek reports: The automaker, through its "Tesla Motors Canada" subsidiary, filed a new international patent called "Dioxazolones and nitrile sulfites as electrolyte additives for lithium-ion batteries." They wrote in the patent application: "This disclosure covers novel battery systems with fewer operative, electrolyte additives that may be used in different energy storage applications, for example, in vehicle and grid-storage. More specifically, this disclosure includes additive electrolyte systems that enhance performance and lifetime of lithium-ion batteries, while reducing costs from other systems that rely on more or other additives."

The patent application says that the new two-additive mixtures in an electrolyte solvent can be used with lithium nickel manganese cobalt compounds, also known as an NMC battery chemistry. It is commonly used in electric vehicles by many automakers, but not by Tesla. The company used the technology in its stationary energy storage systems, but it uses NCA for its vehicle battery cells. The patent filed by Tesla's battery research group mentions that the technology would be useful for both electric vehicles and grid-storage.

A Google Brain and Imperial College London team have built a system -- Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive SUmmarization Sequence-to-sequence, or Pegasus -- that leverages Google's Transformers architecture combined with pretraining objectives tailored for abstractive text generation. From a report: They say it achieves state-of-the-art results in 12 summarization tasks spanning news, science, stories, instructions, emails, patents, and legislative bills, and that it shows "surprising" performance on low-resource summarization, surpassing previous top results on six data sets with only 1,000 examples. As the researchers point out, text summarization aims to generate accurate and concise summaries from input documents, in contrast to executive techniques. Rather than merely copy fragments from the input, abstractive summarization might produce novel words or cover principal information such that the output remains linguistically fluent.

Transformers are a type of neural architecture introduced in a paper by researchers at Google Brain, Google's AI research division. As do all deep neural networks, they contain functions (neurons) arranged in interconnected layers that transmit signals from input data and slowly adjust the synaptic strength (weights) of each connection -- that's how all AI models extract features and learn to make predictions. But Transformers uniquely have attention. Every output element is connected to every input element, and the weightings between them are calculated dynamically.

The AI world is booming in a range of metrics covering research, education, and technical achievements, according to AI Index report -- an annual rundown of machine learning data points now in its third year. From a news writeup, which outlines some of the more interesting and pertinent points: AI research is rocketing. Between 1998 and 2018, there's been a 300 percent increase in the publication of peer-reviewed papers on AI. Attendance at conferences has also surged; the biggest, NeurIPS, is expecting 13,500 attendees this year, up 800 percent from 2012.
AI education is equally popular. Enrollment in machine learning courses in universities and online continues to rise. Numbers are hard to summarize, but one good indicator is that AI is now the most popular specialization for computer science graduates in North America. Over 21 percent of CS PhDs choose to specialize in AI, which is more than double the second-most popular discipline: security / information assurance.
The US is still the global leader in AI by most metrics. Although China publishes more AI papers than any other nation, work produced in the US has a greater impact, with US authors cited 40 percent more than the global average. The US also puts the most money into private AI investment (a shade under $12 billion compared to China in second place globally with $6.8 billion) and files many more AI patents than any other country (with three times more than the number two nation, Japan).
AI algorithms are becoming faster and cheaper to train. Research means nothing unless it's accessible, so this data point is particularly welcome. The AI Index team noted that the time needed to train a machine vision algorithm on a popular dataset (ImageNet) fell from around three hours in October 2017 to just 88 seconds in July 2019. Costs also fell, from thousands of dollars to double-digit figures.
Self-driving cars received more private investment than any AI field. Just under 10 percent of global private investment went into autonomous vehicles, around $7.7 billion. That was followed by medical research and facial recognition (both attracting $4.7 billion), while the fastest-growing industrial AI fields were less flashy: robot process automation ($1 billion investment in 2018) and supply chain management (over $500 million).

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: A new study published by the Brookings Institution takes a closer look at jobs that are the most exposed to artificial intelligence (AI), a subset of automation where machines learn to use judgment and logic to complete tasks -- and to what degree. For the study, Stanford University doctoral candidate Michael Webb analyzed the overlap between more than 16,000 AI-related patents and more than 800 job descriptions and found that highly-educated, well-paid workers may be heavily affected by the spread of AI.

Workers who hold a bachelor's degree, for example, would be exposed to AI over five times more than those with only a high school degree. That's because AI is especially good at completing tasks that require planning, learning, reasoning, problem-solving and predicting -- most of which are skills required for white collar jobs. Other forms of automation, namely in robotics and software, are likely to impact the physical and routine work of traditionally blue-collar jobs. [...] Well-paid managers, supervisors and analysts may also be heavily impacted by AI. Anima Anandkumar, director of machine learning research at Nvidia, said workers should evaluate the future of their own roles by asking three questions: Is my job fairly repetitive? Are there well-defined objectives to evaluate my job? Is there a large amount of data accessible to train an AI system? If the answer to all three of these questions is yes, Anandkumar says AI exposure is likely and suggests workers should aim for jobs that require more creativity and human intuition.

According to the report, some of the jobs that face the highest exposure to AI in the near future include: Chemical engineers, political scientists, nuclear technicians, and physicists.

An appeals court ruled that Apple doesn't have to pay $503 million to VirnetX, a company often accused of being a patent troll. The court didn't reverse the original patent-infringement decision though, it just said the amount must be recalculated or a new trial held. Cult of Mac reports: VirnetX Holding Corp is sometimes referred to as a patent troll because it doesn't produce any products. It just collects patents, forces other companies to pay licensing fees on them, or files lawsuits when it thinks its patents have been infringed. VirnetX and Apple have gone head-to-head multiple times over the years. In this latest case, the iPhone maker was ordered to pay $302.4 million because FaceTime infringes on two patents. This was later increased to $439 million.

The figure had apparently grown to $503 million before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit rejected that amount, according to Bloomberg. In its decision, the court decided that Apple can't re-argue the question of whether VirnetX's patents are valid. But the company does get a chance to lower the penalty.

dryriver writes: Everybody seems to think these days that kids desperately need to learn how to code when they turn six years old. But this ignores a glaring fact -- the biggest shortage in the future labor market is not people who can code competently in Python, Java or C++, it is people who can actually discover or invent completely new and better ways of doing things, whether this is in CS, Physics, Chemistry, Biology or other fields. If you look at the history of great inventors, the last truly gifted, driven and prolific non-corporate inventor is widely regarded to be Nikola Tesla, who had around 700 patents to his name by the time he died. After Tesla, most new products, techniques and inventions have come out of corporate, government or similar structures, not from a good old-fashioned, dedicated, driven, independent-minded, one-person inventor who feverishly dreams up new things and new possibilities and works for the betterment of humanity.

How do you teach inventing to kids? By teaching them the methods of Genrikh Altshuller, for example. Seriously, does teaching five to seven year olds 50-year-old CS/coding concepts and techniques do more for society than teaching kids to rebel against convention, think outside the box, turn convention upside down and beat their own path towards solving a thorny problem? Why does society want to create an army of code monkeys versus an army of kids who learn how to invent new things from a young age? Or don't we want little Nikola Teslas in the 21st Century, because that creates "uncertainty" and "risk to established ways of doing things?"

The US office responsible for patents and trademarks is trying to figure out how AI might call for changes to copyright law, and it's asking the public for opinions on the topic. From a report: The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a notice in the Federal Register last month saying it's seeking comments, as spotted by TorrentFreak. The office is gathering information about the impact of artificial intelligence on copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property rights. It outlines thirteen specific questions, ranging from what happens if an AI creates a copyright-infringing work to if it's legal to feed an AI copyrighted material. It starts off by asking if output made by AI without any creative involvement from a human should qualify as a work of authorship that's protectable by US copyright law. If not, then what degree of human involvement "would or should be sufficient so that the work qualifies for copyright protection?" Other questions ask if the company that trains an AI should own the resulting work, and if it's okay to use copyrighted material to train an AI in the first place. "Should authors be recognized for this type of use of their works?" asks the office. "If so, how?"

Cloudflare was sued by a notorious patent troll Blackbird Technologies in 2016. Instead of giving up to its demands, Cloudflare employed a different strategy. From a blog post: In October 2016, Blackbird was looking to acquire additional patents for their portfolio when they found an incredibly broad software patent with the ambiguous title, "PROVIDING AN INTERNET THIRD PARTY DATA CHANNEL." They acquired this patent from its owner for $1 plus "other good and valuable consideration." A little later, in March 2017, Blackbird decided to assert that patent against Cloudflare. [...] Companies facing such claims usually convince themselves that settlements in the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars are quicker and cheaper outcomes than facing years of litigation and millions of dollars in attorneys fees. We decided we would do our best to turn the incentive structure on its head and make patent trolls think twice before attempting to take advantage of the system. We created Project Jengo in an effort to remove this economic asymmetry from the litigation. In our initial blog post we suggested we could level the playing field by: (i) defending ourselves vigorously against the patent lawsuit instead of rolling over and paying a licensing fee or settling, (ii) funding awards for crowdsourced prior art that could be used to invalidate any of Blackbird's patents, not just the one asserted against Cloudflare, and (iii) asking the relevant bar associations to investigate what we considered to be Blackbird's violations of the rules of professional conduct for attorneys.

As promised, we fought the lawsuit vigorously. And as explained in a blog post earlier this year, we won as convincing a victory as one could in federal litigation at both the trial and appellate levels. In early 2018, the District Court for the Northern District of California dismissed the case Blackbird brought against us on subject matter eligibility grounds in response to an Alice motion. In a mere two-page order, Judge Vince Chhabria held that "[a]bstract ideas are not patentable" and Blackbird's assertion of the patent "attempts to monopolize the abstract idea of monitoring a preexisting data stream between a server and a client." Essentially, the case was rejected before it ever really started because the court found Blackbird's patent to be invalid. Blackbird appealed that decision to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, which unceremoniously affirmed the lower court decision dismissing the appeal just three days after the appellate argument was heard. Following this ruling, we celebrated.

As noted in our earlier blog post, although we won the litigation as quickly and easily as possible, the federal litigation process still lasted nearly two years, involved combined legal filings of more than 1,500 pages, and ran up considerable legal expenses. Blackbird's right to seek review of the decision by the US Supreme Court expired this summer, so the case is now officially over. As we've said from the start, we only intended to pursue Project Jengo as long as the case remained active. Even though we won decisively in court, that alone is not enough to change the incentive structure around patent troll suits. Patent trolls are repeat players who don't have significant operations, so the costs of litigation and discovery are much less for them.

schwit1 shares a report from The New York Times: The N.I.H. and the F.B.I. have begun a vast effort to root out scientists who they say are stealing biomedical research for other countries from institutions across the United States. Almost all of the incidents they uncovered and that are under investigation involve scientists of Chinese descent, including naturalized American citizens, allegedly stealing for China. Seventy-one institutions, including many of the most prestigious medical schools in the United States, are now investigating 180 individual cases involving potential theft of intellectual property. The cases began after the N.I.H., prompted by information provided by the F.B.I., sent 18,000 letters last year urging administrators who oversee government grants to be vigilant. So far, the N.I.H. has referred 24 cases in which there may be evidence of criminal activity to the inspector general's office of the Department of Health and Human Services, which may turn over the cases for criminal prosecution.

The investigations have fanned fears that China is exploiting the relative openness of the American scientific system to engage in wholesale economic espionage. At the same time, the scale of the dragnet has sent a tremor through the ranks of biomedical researchers, some of whom say ethnic Chinese scientists are being unfairly targeted for scrutiny as Washington's geopolitical competition with Beijing intensifies. The alleged theft involves not military secrets, but scientific ideas, designs, devices, data and methods that may lead to profitable new treatments or diagnostic tools. Some researchers under investigation have obtained patents in China on work funded by the United States government and owned by American institutions, the N.I.H. said. Others are suspected of setting up labs in China that secretly duplicated American research, according to government officials and university administrators. [...] [R]oughly a dozen scientists are known to have resigned or been fired from universities and research centers across the United States so far. Some have declined to discuss the allegations against them; others have denied any wrongdoing. In several cases, scientists supported by the N.I.H. or other federal agencies are accused of accepting funding from the Chinese government in violation of N.I.H. rules. Some have said that they did not know the arrangements had to be disclosed or were forbidden.

David Ruddock of AndroidPolice technology blog tries to make sense of last week's $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit by Google. He argues that Fitbit's offerings -- hardware, software, engineering talent, or even patent wall -- can't save Google's wearable operating system Wear OS. From his column: Hardware is what Google is after, with a blog post cleatly stating its acquisition of Fitbit is about future Wear OS devices, meaning you can probably kiss Fitbit's unloved smartwatch OS goodbye. So, that means we can count on Google leveraging Fitbit's renowned hardware to finally give Wear OS the horsepower and capabilities it needs to compete with Apple, right? Well, no. Fitbit's smartwatches have been most lauded for their long battery life, which has historically been enabled by extremely slow but highly power-efficient processors. The Versa 2 allegedly comes with significant performance improvements, but as a smartwatch, it just isn't very... smart. Michael Fisher points out in his review that the Versa 2's near week-long life on a single charge is only impressive when looked at in a very generous light. The Versa 2 doesn't have GPS, the battery only lasts that long when not using the always-on display (with AoD, it's closer to 3 days), the watch itself doesn't work for almost anything but fitness tracking on its own, and most of your interactions with it end up happening on your smartphone anyway. I can also tell you from experience that the Apple Watch Series 5 lasts about two days on a charge with the always-on display enabled (and Samsung's watches last even longer), so Fitbit managing a day more which a much less useful watch isn't exactly game-changing technology.

In short, Fitbit's products are not ones Google should be excited about buying. The hardware is nothing special, and the software is clearly going in the dumpster. What has Google bought, then? The sad, very practical truth is probably patents and engineers. Fitbit does develop at least some of its hardware in-house, and likely has a decent number of patents related to fitness tracking and basic wearable technology, including those stemming from its acquisition of Pebble. Its product engineers would receive resources and tools at Google that Fitbit may not have afforded them. In short: Google's purchase is almost certainly a speculative one. Google is hoping that Fitbit's technology portfolio and its engineering talent can create a better, faster, stronger Wear OS watch. That isn't the kind of acquisition that screams "our product is successful," it's one that looks far more like a Hail Mary from a company that is rapidly losing any hope of remaining relevant in the wearables space. A more cynical view of Google's acquisition might argue that this is more about Fitbit's brand and users than anything else. If Google simply markets its in-house smartwatches as Fitbits running Wear OS, it would be more able to tap into Fitbit's existing customer base and retail relationships. Customer base is something Wear OS is sorely missing at the moment, and Fitbit is a brand that many consumers recognize, albeit mostly for the company's "dumb" fitness trackers, not its smartwatches. Speaking of, given Google's focus on Wear OS as part of this acquisition, my guess is that those more popular but very basic trackers will be discontinued.

Freshly Exhumed shares a report from Futurism: Canada's Hyperstealth Biotechnology already manufactures camouflage uniforms for militaries across the globe. But now, the company has patented a new "Quantum Stealth" material that disguises a military's soldiers -- or even its tanks, aircraft, and ships -- by making anything behind it seem invisible. Earlier in October, Hyperstealth filed a patent for the material, which doesn't require a power source and is both paper-thin and inexpensive -- all traits that could make it appealing for use on the battlefield. Alongside the news of the patent application, Hyperstealth released more than 100-minutes worth of footage describing and demonstrating the material.

Roomba robotic vacuum maker IRobot Corp. is suing rival SharkNinja for copying a device of theirs and selling it at "half the price." "Shark is not even shy about being a copycat," iRobot said in a lawsuit filed Tuesday in federal court in Boston, "claiming that the Shark IQ Robot offers the same iRobot technology at 'half the price of iRobot i7+'."Bloomberg reports: The company that unveiled the Roomba robotic vacuum in the early 2000s launched a product last year that takes house cleaning to a new level: It maps your home, schedules sweeps through each room, empties the dust bin itself and even knows where to resume cleaning after has returned to its base for a recharge. After being recognized by Time magazine for one of 2018's inventions of the year, IRobot Corp. says it's no accident that rival SharkNinja Operating LLC came out with a similar device a year later. [...] SharkNinja, a unit of closely held EP Midco LLC, on Friday filed a pre-emptive lawsuit in federal court in Delaware, asking the court to declare that the Shark IQ doesn't infringe six patents cited in iRobot's complaint, nor five others. IRobot had previously demanded that the Shark IQ be pulled off store shelves.