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The BPTO informs that on August 31, 2023, Technical Note No. 01/2023 was published by the Permanent Committee for the Improvement of Procedures and Guidelines for Examination of Marks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications (CPAPD), as provided for by art. 14 of INPI/PR Ordinance No. 491/19.

Source: BPTO

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A tool launched this month by OpenAI seeks to feed its artificial intelligence models. Other sites such as Amazon and Wikihow also denied access.

Several newspapers and media outlets from different countries have decided to block the webpage tracking tool used by OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, which seeks to improve its artificial intelligence models.

The New York Times, CNN, Australian broadcaster ABC, and news agencies Reuters and Bloomberg blocked access to GPPTot, the webpage crawler launched on Aug. 8.

Other French media, such as France 24, RFI, Mediapart, Radio France, and TF1, followed suit.

“One thing that will not be tolerated is the unauthorized looting of content,” Radio France president Sibyle Veil said at a recent event.

The bot collects data on the internet

GPBTot’s mission is to collect all data and information from web pages to feed its generative artificial intelligence models.

However, the Californian startup, which made public how to prevent its robot from accessing a website’s data, is facing growing rejection from different publications.

According to Originality.ai, a tool that detects plagiarism, almost 10% of the most important pages in the world were denied access to GPBTot two weeks after its launch.

Amazon.com, Wikihow.com, Quora.com, and the Shutterstock image bank are among them. According to Originality.ai, if this pace is maintained, the proportion of sites prohibiting access to GPBTot will increase by 5% per week.

“There’s no reason why they should benefit from our content for nothing,” said Laurent Frisch, director of digital strategy and innovation at Radio France.

Copyright

Tools of the new generation of artificial intelligence (AI), capable of generating content from fragments of information, such as the ChatGPT text chat or the DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney image generators, have become very popular in the last year.

With a friendly interface, they are tools capable of creating content from simple user commands.

However, the companies responsible for these tools, such as OpenAI and Stability AI, are now facing demands from artists and content producers who allege these tools infringe on copyrights.

– Enough of us being looted by these companies that profit at the expense of our production – complained Vincent Fleury, digital director of France Medias Monde, holding company of France 24 and RFI.

Search for fair remuneration

Executives at some French media outlets also expressed concern that their content could be associated with false information. They call for open discussions on these topics with OpenAI and other AI companies.

– The media must be remunerated fairly. WeBertrand Gié, director of the News Division of the French newspaper Le Figaro, wants to obtain licensing and payment agreements.

The American news agency Associated Press (AP) signed an agreement with OpenAI in July, authorizing it to consult its archives since 1985 in exchange for access to the technology and AI expertise of the laboratory that created ChatGPT.

OpenAI has also pledged $5 million to the American Journalism Project, an organization supporting local news outlets, and an additional $5 million funding to help implement AI technologies.

A consortium of media outlets, including the AFP, Associated Press, and Gannett/USA Today, published an open letter in August urging leaders of AI companies to seek permission before using their text and images to generate content.

Source: O Globo

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With a significant number of 41 patents obtained in the area of recombinant vaccine development, diagnosis of veterinary diseases, and formulations with antiparasitic action, Sibele Borsuk, coordinator of the Graduate Program in Biotechnology at the Federal University of Pelotas (UFPel), sees closer the transformation of years of studies into innovation, with the possibility of products resulting from these advances reaching the market. The researcher’s performance was recognized with the Futuro da Terra Award in the Innovation and Rural Technology category.

A member of UFPel’s Technological Innovation Committee (CIT) and the Internal Biosafety Commission (CIBio), she leads the institution’s infectious-parasitic biotechnology research group, contributing to advances in an area that still needs to evolve.

Sibele points out that, about recombinant vaccines or third-generation vaccines, there is greater availability of technologies for pets and horses, which are high-value-added animals. “In the niche of production animals (poultry, pigs, sheep, goats, cattle), there are few methodologies available on the market, and, in addition, to have widespread use for the prevention of these diseases in these production species, they need to have a low cost,” he comments.

Its activities have focused on the Development of vaccines and diagnosis of veterinary diseases, with emphasis on caseous lymphadenitis (a condition that affects sheep and goats), bovine neosporosis (one of the leading causes of abortion in sheep), and canine toxocariasis (zoonosis transmitted by parasites shed by dogs in the environment).

In projects related to caseous lymphadenitis, the researcher points out that the results are promising: the group has already tested different types of recombinant vaccines (such as DNA, subunit, and vectorized vaccines) with excellent results in preclinical trials (in mice).

“About 30 vaccine formulations have already been tested with efficacy rates ranging from 30% to 100%. She adds that the ones with the best performance are evaluated in the target species (sheep and goats)”.

Within this project’s scope, the group has 17 patent registrations with the Brazilian Patent Office (BPTO), one of which was granted this year. “For neosporosis, the most important results are for the diagnosis where we standardized a diagnostic method based on the fluorescence polarization technique. It was registered with the BPTO, and we had the patent filed”, she adds. Regarding toxocariasis, the project aims to diagnose different species (including canine and bovine, in addition to analyzing human contact with the T. canis parasite), resulting in two more registered patents.

In total, the projects led by the researcher account for 41 patents (innovation privilege) in the area of Development of recombinant vaccines, diagnosis of diseases of veterinary importance, and formulations with antiparasitic action — of these, the BPTO granted four.

Sibele comments that the most important is related to the production of recombinant vaccines for caseous lymphadenitis. “The BPTO takes around ten years to assess whether the patent has unprecedented technology,” she explains. Only after this evaluation the grant is made to the holder (the institution where the research was carried out and the inventors, including the researcher responsible for the study).

“We have not yet launched any product resulting from the granted patents on the market, but the granting of four patents issued by the BPTO is a crucial step, which qualifies the patent as an innovation, granting its holder the exclusivity of use, commercialization, and production of a certain technology in Brazil,” he explains. “The next step is the search for companies in diagnosing and producing vaccines,” concludes Sibele.

The researcher has been a Research Productivity Scholar in Biotechnology since 2014. She has been an advisor twice for theses and was awarded the Capes de Thesis Award in 2017. She has produced over 80 scientific articles in international journals and three books in recent years. She has already supervised 21 Scientific Initiation students with grants from development agencies, 15 masters, and 14 doctors.

Source: Jornal do Correio

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A bill pending in Congress provides that ChatGPT and other chatbots must remunerate content authors.

Discussions about possible copyright violations by ChatGPT also take place in Brazil. A bill pending in Congress provides that artificial intelligence chatbots are required to indemnify content authors.

The bill was authored by deputy Jandira Feghali (PC do B-RJ), and the rapporteur added the section that allows for such punishments, deputy Elmar Nascimento (União Brasil-BA), in his last opinion. The proposal includes in the text of the Civil Rights Framework for the Internet the category of “digital platforms for third-party content,” which provides for “artificial intelligence” services.

The project still needs to be approved by the Legislature and must change. The vote in the Chamber of Deputies may take place in the coming days, but the text is under pressure from the big techs, according to a report by Folha de São Paulo.

ChatGPT: Legislation is unclear

• For the digital law and data protection lawyer at the Medina Guimarães office, Micaela Ribeiro, including artificial intelligence in the discussion is an “advance, albeit minimal.”
• According to Diogenes Mizumukai, also from the area of digital law and founding partner of the BFMK office, the law is essential because “it includes artificial intelligence, specifically inserted as a digital platform, as a means of propagating authorial works.”
  However, the problem pointed out by both is that there is still a legal vacuum on the ownership of the copyright of what AI produces.
• Some argue that the creator of artificial intelligence should be considered the author.
• Others argue that this position must be shared between the work’s creator and the tool.
• “[The proposal] brings the prerogative of the copyright holder so that he can request remuneration if the artificial intelligence platform somehow indexes his work,” understands Mizumukai.
• Marcela Ribeiro states that “compensation is something that should be discussed, but not just with a mention in a paragraph, without saying how, or for whom. The project says it must be done but does not show how”.

Compensation for journalistic content

• Bill 2370 also wants to oblige broadcasters and streaming platforms to new copyright payments for singers, actors, and audiovisual works.
• And it even provides for the remuneration of journalistic content by big techs.
• “Care is taken to prevent big techs from benefiting economically from the high investment made by third parties for the production of content, offering meager remuneration in return, given the high concentration of the internet market,” says the text.

Source: Olhar Digital

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The Hague Agreement on the International Registration of Industrial Designs entered force last Thursday (3/8). It is a system that allows the possibility of protection in up to 96 signatory countries with an initial request made in a single language.

The agreement simplifies and reduces bureaucracy in the international protection of industrial designs. The Brazilian furniture, footwear, and clothing industries, among others, will have more legal security to export their products to member countries without being unduly copied.

The registration of industrial design protects the ornamental aspects of industrial products, both in form and in prints and applied patterns. The agreement allows reducing costs and simplifying the procedures necessary for registering products with our own design abroad. The system also encourages the attraction of foreign investment by protecting works by non-residents in the country, a rule that favors registrations made by Brazilians abroad.

Before the agreement’s entry into force, in the case of exports, users had to file the request directly with the Intellectual Property offices of each country where they intended to sell the products, pay fees and present the documents in the respective languages.

With the agreement, when requesting the BPTO, the interested party informs that the registration must be made according to the terms of the Hague Agreement without the need for immediate translation into all the languages of the other countries. Then, it must notify the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) in which countries it wants to protect industrial design. In the next step, WIPO will be responsible for sending the documentation to the countries listed by the applicant.

The change in procedures makes starting and administering the registration process more accessible. However, each country must examine the application and charge fees for this service. The standardization of procedures makes the steps more agile and simplified.

“The agreement will provide a ‘single window’ for protecting industrial designs,” says Andrea Macera, secretary of Competitiveness and Regulatory Policies at the Ministry of Development, Industry, Commerce and Services.

Concluded in 1999 in Geneva, Switzerland, the Hague Agreement had Brazil’s accession approved by Congress in October 2022.

Source: MDCI

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Good news for entrepreneurs who want to protect and market their products with a distinctive design abroad.

With the entry into force of the Hague Agreement this Tuesday, August 1, 2023, the system that allows the registration of up to 100 industrial designs in up to 96 countries (including Brazil itself) is already operating in Brazil through a single international application. In this way, reducing costs and simplifying procedures for national companies will be possible.

Approved by the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate in 2022, Brazilian adherence to the Hague System was formalized this year with the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), allowing its entry into force in August.

Operated by WIPO, which will receive international applications for industrial design, the Hague System will also contribute to attracting foreign investment in the country, as it will facilitate the protection of industrial designs by non-residents of the national territory.

Upon filing, applications will be forwarded by WIPO for review to the national IP authority in each country. In the case of Brazil, the Brazilian Patent Office (BPTO) will be responsible.

To provide for the registration of industrial designs within the scope of the Hague Agreement, the BPTO published Ordinance INPI/PR No. 25 of July 3, 2023, which can be accessed on the Industrial Design Legislation page on the Institute’s portal.

To subsidize the regulation, the Institute conducted a public consultation between April and May of this year, whose responses are also available on the portal.

What is an industrial design registration?

The registration of industrial design protects the ornamental aspects of an object that can be reproduced industrially – both its three-dimensional form and two-dimensional aspects, such as applied prints and patterns.

Interested parties can request this registration if they have created, for example, the new plastic form of a watch, toy, vehicle, packaging, footwear, or even a fabric print’s line and color pattern.

Source: BPTO

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Billionaire Elon Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter as X could be complicated from a legal point of view: companies like Meta and Microsoft already have intellectual property rights over the same letter.

X is so widely used and referenced in trademarks that it is a candidate for legal challenges, and the company, formerly known as Twitter, could face problems defending its X brand in the future.

“There’s a 100% chance that someone over this will sue Twitter,” said trademark attorney Josh Gerben. He counted nearly 900 active U.S. trademark registrations covering the letter X in various sectors.

Musk renamed Twitter “X” on Monday and unveiled a new logo for the social media platform, a stylized black and white version of the letter.

Owners of trademarks – which protect items such as brand names, logos, and slogans that identify product sources – can claim infringement if another mark causes consumer confusion. Remedial measures range from monetary damages to blocking use.

Since 2003, Microsoft has owned an X trademark for communications about its Xbox video game. Meta — whose Threads platform is a new rival to Twitter — has a U.S. trademark registered in 2019 that encompasses a blue and white letter “X” for fields that include software and social media.

Gerben said that Meta and Microsoft likely won’t sue unless they feel threatened by Twitter’s X invading the brand equity they’ve built with the letter.

The three companies did not respond to requests for comment.

Meta itself faced intellectual property challenges when it changed its name from Facebook. It faces trademark lawsuits filed last year by investment firm Metacapital and virtual reality firm MetaX and has settled another lawsuit over its new infinity logo.

And if Musk changes the name, others can still claim the “X” for themselves.

“Given the difficulty of protecting a single letter, especially one as commercially popular as ‘X,’ Twitter’s protection will likely be limited to graphics very similar to its X logo,” said Douglas Masters, trademark attorney at Loeb & Loeb.

“The logo is not distinctive, so that protection will be minimal.”

Source: CNN

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Three graphic designers are suing Chinese fast-fashion giant Shein over what they claim is “egregious” copyright infringement and extortion.

In the lawsuit filed in California Federal Court on Tuesday, the designers allege that Shein produced and sold exact copies of their designs.

They claim Shein uses “secret algorithms” to determine fashion trends – algorithms they claim “wouldn’t work” without generating exact copies of the artists’ work.

The designers say the company got rich by “committing individual infractions repeatedly.”

The lawsuit points out that the fast-fashion retailer violated the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, arguing that these allegations are appropriate because Shein is not just a single entity but rather an “association of de facto entities.”

“No Coco Chanel or Yves Saint Laurent is behind the Shein empire. Instead, there is a mysterious tech genius, Xu Yangtian, also known as Chris Xu,” the lawsuit states.

Citing a BBC Channel 4 documentary, “Inside the Shein Machine,” the lawsuit adds: “When you start to look behind it, who the company is for, it’s a big black hole.”

The complaint alleges that Shein’s corporate structure reveals that the company is a decentralized group of entities so that the company can avoid “liability” and “disclosure of basic information.”

A Shein spokesperson said: “Shein takes all infringement claims seriously, and we take swift action when valid intellectual property rights holders file complaints. We will defend ourselves vigorously against this lawsuit and any claims without merit.”

Krista Perry, one of the designers who showcased the process, created a product titled “Make it Fun,” a print that features a multicolored design around the phrase.

According to the lawsuit, she soon noticed that Shein.com was selling copies of her designs. Following the complaint, she alleges that the email address copyright@shein.com sent her a message offering $500, which she declined.

According to the “About Us” page, Shein says the company only makes 100 to 200 pieces of each model at launch.

These small quantities are intentional; the lawsuit alleges that, before making more parts, Shein can see if anyone complains about a stolen design.

Source: CNN

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The National Advertising Self-Regulation Council of Brazil (Conar) opened last Friday (7) an ethical representation against one of the advertisements for the release of the movie “Barbie,” starring Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.

This means that the trailer for the release of the feature can no longer be shown in any cinema session whose classification is open to children under 12 years of age to verify their compliance with the recommendations of the Brazilian Advertising Self-Regulation Code.

The agency said the representation “is solely and exclusively aimed at the advertisement, since the film is an artistic work, therefore outside the scope of the Code.”

For CNN, Conar’s press office said that Warner, responsible for production and distribution, can “appeal the injunction and is invited to defend itself before Conar’s Ethics Council.”

Official note from Conar

“Then, the rapporteur for the representation granted a partial injunction, taking into account that the trailer is being ostensibly displayed for children and with scenes of non-urbanity, lack of good manners or violent/unsafe act, which violates recommendations of Section 11 of the Code.

In this sense, and because the protection of children’s rights is subject to the precautionary principle, it granted a partial preliminary injunction, recommending that the disclosure of one of the film’s teasers be stopped, a restriction valid only for disclosures in commercial space blocks at cinema sessions films with an indicative rating of less than 12 years, as this is the child protection age established by article 2 of the Child and Adolescent Statute.”

CNN contacted Warner questioning the company’s position, and until the publication of this text, there was no response.

Source: CNN

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Chinese tech giant Huawei has once again claimed the top spot in the 5G patents ranking, beating out notable competitors such as Qualcomm and Samsung.

Huawei stands out with 14.59% of global 5G patents

According to a recent report by the Chinese Academy of Information and Communication Technology, Huawei’s 5G patents rank first in the world regarding standards. The report, titled “Global 5G Standard Essential Patent Investigation and Proposed Standard (2023),” reveals that Huawei’s effective global patent families account for 14.59% of the worldwide market.

On the other hand, Qualcomm ranks second with 10.04% of the patents, and Samsung ranks third with 8.80% of the patent share.

Other Big Players in the 5G Patent Ranking

The top 10 players in this ranking include ZTE, LG, Nokia, Ericsson, Datang, OPPO, and Xiaomi. Huawei has remained a leader in 5G technologies, and the company holds most of the 5G network patents in the world.

This leadership reaffirms Huawei’s central role in the telecommunications industry. Despite recent turmoil and geopolitical challenges, the company has managed to maintain its dominant position in the race for 5G technology leadership, outperforming some of its biggest international competitors.

Source: MSN