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Facing several patent lawsuits, Samsung is preparing for 2019 with six different registrations for notch models on smartphone screens. The patents were granted on 10 December 2018 and show various Samsung Galaxy smartphones with notch. In some cases, the notch is partly integrated in the upper bezel.

The new formats provide circular or semi-circular cutouts at the top of the displays to include a front camera. These new notch formats differ from the screens already presented by Samsung, known as Infinity (O, U and V) precisely by the cut formats. Two models show the front camera being placed directly under the bezel. In two other designs the notch is partly integrated in the bezel. This way an even larger screen surface can be realized.

It is possible that these cutouts are for “non-Infinity” screens that do not have such thin edges on the sides. We can, therefore, expect the Korean to use these new options on incoming smartphones, such as some of the new Galaxy M family phones – ranging from premium intermediaries to entry phones.

Even with these patents, it is not possible to say when or how Samsung might implement these new notch or notch formats. It may even be that the company never takes these ideas off the paper, which is the case with most patents registered by large global companies.

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LG is the latest smartphone maker to join the KFTC (Korean Fair Trade Commission – South Korea’s regulatory authority for economic competition) and other companies in the lawsuit against Qualcomm. The group has already sued Qualcomm in 2016, when Qualcomm was expected to pay a 1.03 trillion won fine ($917.4 million) for abusing its patents back then.

Since Qualcomm disagrees, the KFTC filed a lawsuit and other companies joined including Apple, MediaTek, Intel, Huawei, and Samsung – except Samsung pulled from this initial stance after it announced a cross-license partnership with Qualcomm. While Samsung’s withdrawal was bad for the lawsuit, LG’s new stance strengthens the KFTC’s case again, particularly with LG being a Korean company.

According to Business Korea industry sources claim that LG chose to participate in the legal efforts against Qualcomm due to shaky negotiations between LG and Qualcomm in the US. Qualcomm’s ongoing legal fight with Apple recently resulted in Apple’s iPhones being banned in China and possibly Germany. The chip-maker alleges that Apple incorrectly used two key Qualcomm patents without paying royalties. The affected devices include all iPhones from the iPhone 6s to the iPhone X, all of which were banned from being sold in China.

As Business Korea notes, LG also does business with Qualcomm, so it will not be strange if the company takes a step backward in this move. Qualcomm and the KFTC are still years away from reaching a final verdict.

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Facebook has filed new patents that promise to “guess” users’ locations. One of the patents titled “Offline Trajectories,” proposes predicting users’ “location trajectories” based on data from last location where the person logged into the network.

As described in the patent application, this feature would use machine learning to analyze metadata associated with users who already found themselves in whatever geographic location that you’re heading toward.

For example, in case the user is on his lunch break at work, like his company colleagues, Facebook would make a calculation of the likelihood that the person will go there and in case the application is right, it would show ads referring to the places of the region, including said restaurant.

If you’re headed into an internet dead zone where Facebook can’t make any money off of you, Facebook could use its predictions to give itself a heads-up about the dire drop-off and make sure it prefills what otherwise would have been your content time-out.

The other patent has a longer title – “Predicting Locations and Movements of Users Based on Historical Locations for Users of an Online System” The patent application says that those location chains could be used for applications such as “advertising to users based on locations and for providing insights into the movements of users.” It could even differentiate movement trends among those people who live in a city and those who are merely visiting that city.

Yet another of its patents, titled “Location Prediction Using Wireless Signals on Online Social Networks,” – uses NFC (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 4G) signals to survey a full spectrum of audiences and determine behaviors and actions before, during and after they are made. For example, if a group of people that are close the user decides to have a coffee after lunch, Facebook can make a prediction that the user too will do the same, and that he will be doing so because he has finished his lunch.

As with all patent applications, there’s no guarantee that this particular one will be used by the company.

The Brazilian PTO published its annual activity report containing statistical data on the production of the office during the year 2018. It is possible to verify the Institute’s significant productivity gains. For example, the number of patents granted projected for 2018 rose 75% compared to last year. In trademarks, the increase in registrations was 48% and, in industrial design, 53%. The increase in production is also reflected in the fall in backlog: 8% reduction in patents, 47% in trademarks and 75% in industrial design, when comparing this year’s projection with the end of 2017.
In terms of trademarks, the stock of applications pending for examination was reduced from 358,776 at the end of 2017 to 189,122 at the end of 2018. Up to December, 205,896 new applications were received, with a growth of approximately 10.6% in relation to the previous year. The time between filing and the technical examination of trademarks was reduced from 48 months in opposition applications and 24 months in unopposed applications to 13 and 12 months respectively.
Regarding Industrial Designs, the stock of applications pending for examination was reduced from 9,288 at the end of 2017 to 2,353 at the end of 2018. In the period, 13,350 decisions were issued, with growth of approximately 45% over the previous year. 6,201 new orders were received.
In 2018, the Board of Patents, Computer Programs and Topographies of Integrated Circuits (DIRPA) achieved the index of 55 technical decisions per patent examiner in full production. The maintenance of this production was the result of the consolidation of successful initiatives to stimulate productivity, such as remote work, which currently covers 30% of the total number of examiners.
The full report (in Portuguese) can be found here.

The World Intellectual Property Organization released on Monday (03/12) its annual Intellectual Property Indicators Report, including global data on grants and applications for patents, trademarks, industrial designs, geographical indications and other intellectual property rights regarding the year 2017.

The number of patent applications worldwide was 3.17 million, an increase of 5.8% over the previous year, while the number of trademark applications was 12.39 million, and industrial designs, 1,24 million.

According to the report, 84.5% of total patent applications in 2017 belonged to the following five institutes: China, the European Patent Office, Japan, the United States, and South Korea. In trademarks, the Asian institutes had 66.6% of the total amount of applications, followed by Europe (17.7%) and North America (6.4%). Together, Africa, Oceania, Latin America, and the Caribbean represented 9.2% of applications.

This year the report also included, for the first time, statistics on the publishing industry, whose revenue was $ 248 billion in 2017. The United States sold 2,693 million copies of published titles, followed by the United Kingdom (647 (617 million) and France (430 million).

*Translated and adapted from the BPTO’s official web page. You can find the original publication here and the original report from WIPO here.

Representatives of the Brazilian PTO participated in the 20th Congress of the Inter-American Intellectual Property Association (ASIPI), in Rio de Janeiro.
The BPTO Executive Director, Mauro Maia, participated in a panel on models of IP institutes of the future. The panel, which was attended by representatives of Argentina, Brazil, the United States, Guatemala, Peru, and the Dominican Republic, discussed the possibility of IP institutes to add Industrial Property and Copyright Services, as well as actions to combat unfair competition and infringements in the field of IP.
In the vision of the INPI of the future, the executive director visualizes an institution that is an agency and brings together Industrial Property and Copyright. In this way, it would be possible to improve the coordination of actions in the IP area and stimulate awareness of the issue in society.
The executive director also stated that this future agency, with a larger structure than the current one, should act in intelligence (development of strategic studies and public policies in IP), promotion in this area and regulation.

*Translated and adapted from the BPTO’s official web page. You can find the original publication (in Portuguese) here

The Division of Studies and Projects of BPTO’s Patents Department has made available a further sectoral study entitled “Categorization of biotechnology patents based on the International Patent Classification and analysis of the patent filing scenario in this sector in Brazil (2012-2016) “.

The study compared the concepts of biotechnology based on the International Patent Classification (IPC) codes used by WIPO and OECD and suggested a new classifications group, including some areas of biotechnology that had not previously been covered.

It also presents a categorization of biotechnology in 12 areas, making it possible to search in a structured way the patent documents in biotechnology in a comprehensive or more specialized way. Once the proposed set of IPCs has been validated, it has been used to search the patent documents related to biotechnology filed at the BPTO in recent years, and thus to present an overview of the patenting in biotechnology in Brazil, indicating the main characteristics of these patent applications as , for example, the main applicants and the areas of biotechnology with the greatest interest in patent protection in the country.

In this study, the analysis of biotechnology patenting in Brazil between 2012 and 2016 showed that the categories of greatest interest for obtaining patent protection in the country were “medicinal preparations containing peptides” (498 documents), “fermentation” processes ( 439 documents), “peptides containing more than 20 amino acids” (261 documents), “measurement and assay involving enzymes or microorganisms” (253 documents); “Immunoassays” (198 documents) and “biological treatment of water, sewage, sludge and sludge” (151 documents).

The study also indicates a greater participation of national depositors in the biotechnology patenting scenario in Brazil, demonstrating that the development of research and innovation in biotechnology in the country is a relatively recent activity and almost 75% of all patents licensed in Brazil come from universities and research centers in Brazil.

*Translated and adapted from the BPTO’s official web page. You can find the original publication (in Portuguese) here.

According to The Verge, Qualcomm has suffered a major setback in a lawsuit that probes possible attempts to block competition in the US mobile market. A federal court in the United States has ruled that the company must license its modem patents to compete with chipmakers, potentially weakening a possible monopoly formation in the smartphone modem segment.

The case, in the hands of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) since 2017 analyses whether Qualcomm, working only with the supply of parts and not with the licensing of its technologies, acts to prevent the advanced competition. The decision itself does not specifically address this issue, but under the ruling, Qualcomm would be disregarding agreements related to mobile phone standards, which were accepted only because the company agreed that it would license such technologies to all interested parties.   It shows that the US government begins to take steps to avoid a dominance of the sector by the manufacturer.

Names such as Intel, Huawei and Samsung are nominally cited in the process as examples of companies to which Qualcomm must license the technologies “needed to manufacture a smartphone modem.” To date, such companies have been limited to licensing ancillary patents and should work only on supply agreements while, if interested in creating their own solutions, they should find an alternative path to that registered by the rival.

This decision is good news to the industry, since it could enable more companies to build modems or for those modems to be more competitive than today.

There is still appeal against the decision and Qualcomm has not ruled on the matter. Despite the negative news for the company, the federal court has not determined a maximum amount that can be charged for patents, another matter related to the ongoing process by the FTC.

It is not the first time that Qualcomm has been convicted of anti-competitive practices, but the ruling is unprecedented as to the influence of a regulatory body on corporate practices. Earlier, she had already been fined in the European Union, China, Taiwan, and North Korea for violating antitrust rules; currently faces similar disputes not only with governments from different territories but also with Apple.

Source: The Verge

According to the German Magazine “Der Spiegel”, the U.S. semiconductor supplier Broadcom has made a patent claim for more than $1 billion against Volkswagen and is threatening to seek a judicial ban on the production of several car models, such as Golf, Passat, Touran, Tiguan and various models of Porsche and Audi.

The patent suit has been filed by the US company in Munich and Mannheim and it concerns the use of a total of 18 of his patents in navigation and entertainment systems, which the VW Group uses in several car models, according to the claim.

Broadcom has also began a legal action in the US against the Japanese Toyota and Panasonic, among other companies, for alleged patent infringement . Affected companies are under great pressure to agree with the supplier before courts decide. These could provisionally prohibit the use of the corresponding semiconductors and thus bring production to a standstill.

Bank of America, the second largest bank in the US with over 50 cryptocurrency and blockchain-related patents to their name, has received the grant of a patent that allows the bank to set up a digital storage for private Keys. The patent was filed by the bank in September 2016 and was awarded to them on October 30, 2018.

The bank is among the biggest players in the US when it comes to filing patents related to blockchain and cryptocurrencies.

Titled ‘Systems and devices for hardened remote storage of private cryptography keys used for authentication’, this patent talks about a ‘tamper-responsive’ remote storage of private Keys as can be seen in the extract below:

“[While many […] devices may provide for acquiring evidence of a security breach (i.e., physical or non-physical tampering with the device and/or the data), such devices do not provide for a real-time response to such breaches, such that misappropriation of private cryptography keys is prevented,” BoA writes. The patent filing continues: “Therefore, a need exists for a secure means for storing private cryptography keys. The desired storage means should reduce the risk of misappropriation of keys due to the keys being stored internally within a computing node that is frequently or, in some instances, continuously accessible via a public communication network, such as the Internet.”

The banking giant has sought several patents in the past few months, these relating variously to external validation, data storage, and others. At the same time, officials have remained skeptical of cryptocurrency itself, banning credit card customers from purchasing it while admitting Bitcoin (BTC) represented a “troubling” issue for its operations.

While this patent does sound quite useful, it is not guaranteed that the bank will bring it to reality, since it is common that companies file patents to secure a technology but very rarely acted upon the patents, especially in the world of cryptocurrencies, where patents are abundant but are rarely used.