Members of the US government held a conference in Washington last week on the topic of Chinese theft of intellectual property from US technology firms and the US academic sector. From a report: Officials said the purpose of the conference -- named the China Initiative Conference -- was to bring the US private sector and the academic and research communities up to speed with the US government's investigations. For the duration of four hours, some of the highest officials from the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Department of Justice (DOJ) spent their time raising a sign of alarm and putting the private and academic sector on alert about the threats they are currently facing in terms of intellectual property (IP) theft from Chinese entities. "The threat from China is real, it's persistent, it's well-orchestrated, it's well-resourced, and it's not going away anytime soon," John Demers, Assistant Attorney General for National Security, opened the conference.

"This one to me really stands out as the greatest long-term threat to our nation's information and intellectual property, and to our economic vitality," said FBI Director Christopher Wray. The FBI director says cases have been piling up since 2018, ever since the DOJ launched the China Initiative campaign to counter and investigate Beijing's economical espionage. "The FBI has about a thousand investigations involving China's attempted theft of U.S.-based technology in all 56 of our field offices and spanning just about every industry and sector," Wray said.

Apple this week has been granted a patent for a foldable device with a unique hinge mechanism that utilizes movable flaps to help prevent the display from being creased or damaged when folded. From a report: Published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office today, the patent explains that the hinge mechanism would ensure adequate separation between the first and second portions of the display. When the device is unfolded, movable flaps would extend to cover the gap, and then retract when the device is folded. Early foldable smartphones like Samsung's Galaxy Fold and Huawei's Mate X have noticeable creases along the bending portion of the display. Motorola's new foldable Razr avoids this issue with a unique hinge design, but early reviews indicate the device makes creaking sounds when opened or closed.

UPDATE (10/15/20230: The court's order did not stand, and by 2023 Caltech had agreed to drop their lawsuit.

Below is Slashdot's original report from 2020:

The California Institute of Technology (CalTech) said it won a $1.1 billion jury verdict in a patent case against Apple and Broadcom. Reuters reports: In a case filed in federal court in Los Angeles in 2016, the Pasadena, California-based research university alleged that Broadcom wi-fi chips used in hundreds of millions of Apple iPhones infringed patents relating to data transmission technology. "While we thank the members of the jury for their service, we disagree with the factual and legal bases for the verdict and intend to appeal," Broadcom said in a statement. Apple said it plans to appeal the verdict, but declined further comment. The company had said in court filings that it believed all of the university's claims against it resulted from it using Broadcom's chips in its devices, calling itself "merely an indirect downstream party." The verdict awarded CalTech $837.8 million from Apple and $270.2 million from Broadcom. "We are pleased the jury found that Apple and Broadcom infringed Caltech patents," CalTech said in a statement. "As a non-profit institution of higher education, Caltech is committed to protecting its intellectual property in furtherance of its mission to expand human knowledge and benefit society through research integrated with education."

Apple applied for a patent for an ambitious design for a new all-in-one computer which integrates both its keyboard and screen into a single curved sheet of glass. The Verge reports: The patent application, which was first spotted by Patently Apple, and which was filed in May last year, describes how the iMac-like computer's "input area" and "display area" could be built into a single continuous surface, while a support structure behind the display could then contain the computer's processing unit, as well as providing space for all the machine's ports.

It's a pretty striking design for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the amount of curved glass involved is far more than Apple has ever used in one of its products before. It's also interesting to see that the company is thinking about taking the iMac's all-in-one design even further, by integrating not just the computer and display together, but also a keyboard and touchpad as well (although the application also describes how the keyboard could be detached during use). The patent also describes how one could dock a MacBook into the device and output the screen to the iMac's display, while its keyboard would pass through a hole in the middle of the machine to let you use it as normal.

Additionally, "the application suggests that its single sheet of glass could fold down its middle to allow you to pack it away when not in use," reports The Verge.

After almost seven years, Nintendo has won a patent case that involved the original Wii. On Tuesday, the company announced that a federal court in Dallas ruled in its favor against iLife Technologies, overturning an earlier 2017 decision that would have forced Nintendo to pay out $10.1 million in damages. Engadget reports: The original suit, which was brought against Nintendo of America in 2013, alleged that the company used iLife's technology to create the Wii's motion-sensing controller. The patent that was at the center of the case described a technology designed to detect when a person falls and monitor babies for symptoms of sudden infant death syndrome. iLife had initially sought $144 million in total damages and an injunction against Nintendo. In this latest ruling, however, the court decided that iLife's claim wasn't specific enough.

IFI Claims, a company that tracks patent activity in the US, reports that 2019 saw a new high-watermark of 333,530 patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. From a report: The figures are notable for a few reasons. One is that this is the most patents ever granted in a single year; and the second that this represents a 15% jump on a year before. The high overall number speaks to the enduring interest in safeguarding IP, while the 15% jump has to do with the fact that patent numbers actually dipped last year (down 3.5%) while the number that were filed and still in application form (not granted) was bigger than ever. If we can draw something from that, it might be that filers and the USPTO were both taking a little more time to file and process, not a reduction in the use of patents altogether. But patents do not tell the whole story in another very important regard. Namely, the world's most valuable, and most high profile tech companies are not always the ones that rank the highest in patents filed. [...] As with previous years -- the last 27, to be exact -- IBM has continued to hold on to the top spot for patents granted, with 9,262 in total for the year. Samsung Electronics, at 6,469, is a distant second.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from IEEE Spectrum: Busan-based firm Jenax has spent the past few years developing J.Flex, an advanced lithium-ion battery that is ultra-thin, flexible, and rechargeable. With the arrival of so many wearable gadgets, phones with flexible displays, and other portable gizmos, "we're now interacting with machines on a different level from what we did before," says EJ Shin, head of strategic planning at Jenax. "What we're doing at Jenax is putting batteries into locations where they couldn't be before," says Shin. Her firm demonstrated some of those new possibilities last week at CES 2020 in Las Vegas.

The devices shown by Jenax included a sensor-lined football helmet developed by UK-based firm HP1 Technologies to measure pressure and force of impact; a medical sensor patch designed in France that will be embedded in clothing to monitor a wearer's heart rate; and wearable power banks in the form of belts and bracelets for patients who must continuously be hooked up to medical devices. To make batteries flexible, companies play around with the components of a battery cell, namely the cathode, anode, electrolyte, and membrane separator. In the case of Jenax, which has more than 100 patents protecting its battery technology, Shin says the secret to its flexibility lies in "a combination of materials, polymer electrolyte, and the know-how developed over the years." J.Flex is made from graphite and lithium cobalt oxide, but its exact composition and architecture remains a secret. "J.Flex can be as thin as 0.5 millimeters (suitable for sensors), and as tiny as 20 by 20 millimeters (mm) or as large as 200 by 200 mm," the report adds. "Its operating voltage is between 3 and 4.25 volts. Depending on the size, battery capacity varies from 10 milliampere-hours to 5 ampere-hours, with close to 90 percent of this capacity remaining after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles. Each charge typically takes an hour. J. Flex's battery life depends on how it's used, Shin says -- a single charge can last for a month in a sensor, but wouldn't last that long if the battery was powering a display."

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.