Petitions to participate in the process for determining distribution of digital audio recording technology royalty fees for 2007-11 Sound Recordings Funds are due Jan. 25, the Copyright Royalty Board said Wednesday.

The G7 ThinQ smartphone is among LG mobile devices, home electronics products and smart appliances infringing eight wireless and communications-technology patents, alleged a Bell Northern Research complaint (in Pacer) Thursday in U.S. District Court in San Diego. BNR, formed in 2017, is “successor in interest” to a “key portfolio” of IP developed at Agere, Broadcom, LSI, Renesas and others, it said. Since the G7 is advertised as being compliant with the “beamforming portions” of the 802.11ac wireless standard, the phone “contains modules operable to compute one or more channel estimate matrices from signals received from a base station,” infringing U.S. patent 7,957,450, granted in June 2011 and assigned to Broadcom, it said. BNR executives met top LG officials in Seoul at least three times in the past year, including as recently as Nov. 30, to give a “detailed presentation” of the infringement, yet LG's bad practices continued, it said. LG didn’t comment.

China’s foreign ministry said the U.S. must withdraw allegations against two state-linked Chinese hackers charged Thursday with intellectual-property cybercrimes (see 1812200059) or risk endangering U.S.-China trade negotiations aimed at averting a March 2 increase in Section 301 tariffs on Chinese imports (see 1812140045). China urges the U.S. “to immediately correct its wrongdoings, stop defaming and discrediting China on the cybersecurity issue, and withdraw its so-called charges against the Chinese nationals so as to avoid seriously damaging bilateral relations and bilateral cooperation in relevant fields,” said a spokesperson Friday. In charging the two Chinese nationals with cybertheft, the U.S. “fabricated stories out of nothing and made unwarranted accusations against China on the cybersecurity issue,” she said. China “has been firmly opposing and cracking down on all forms of cyber espionage. The Chinese government has never participated in or supported others in stealing commercial secrets in any form.”

The Copyright Office requested comment on designation of the Music Modernization Act’s (see 1810160023) mechanical licensing collective (MLC). Initial comments are due March 21, replies April 22, the CO said Friday. The new law establishes a new blanket license for digital music providers offering downloads and interactive streaming. The MLC will develop and maintain a public database for musical works and sound recordings.

Though encrypting data is “relatively simple” using established “mechanisms,” unlocking encrypted data “in the recovery environment is often difficult and sometimes not possible using current techniques,” said a Microsoft patent application published Thursday at the Patent and Trademark Office. Application 20180357412, filed Aug. 21 and naming six Microsoft inventors, describes techniques to “facilitate” the “secure” unlocking and recovery of encrypted data. A consumer device can use “credentials” associated with an authorized user to obtain a “recovery password to unlock keys for interpreting the encrypted volumes,” it said: The device can use a shortened recovery password “in conjunction with anti-hammering capabilities of a Trusted Platform Module in order to unlock keys for interpreting the encrypted volumes.” Friday, the company didn’t comment.

Amazon Web Services stole three Kove inventions to become the world’s first large-scale vendor of “economical cloud infrastructure and services,” alleged a Wednesday complaint (in Pacer) in U.S. District Court in Chicago. AWS' access to the cloud “without having to set up their own servers, software, and functionality” on the wide "scope and scale was made possible through infringement of Kove’s patents,” said Kove. The patent theft paved the way for AWS “to become what is believed to be Amazon’s largest profit center,” it said. Kove is a “small, innovative product company competing in a field of behemoths,” including AWS, it said. Respect for Kove’s IP, “as the law requires, is essential to fair competition,” it said. Kove’s inventors developed the “breakthrough technology” for enabling “high-performance, hyper-scalable” cloud storage years before the commercial “advent” of the cloud, it said. Kove’s technology “became essential to AWS as the volume of data stored on its cloud grew exponentially and its cloud storage business faced limitations on the ability to store and retrieve massive amounts of data,” it said. "We don’t comment on active litigation," emailed Amazon spokesperson Angie Quennell Thursday.

GoPro will move most of U.S.-bound action-camera production from China by summer as a hedge against exposure on “any new” tariffs list, said the company Tuesday. It escaped duties through the three rounds of tariffs imposed between July and September. “Today's geopolitical business environment requires agility, and we're proactively addressing tariff concerns,” said Chief Financial Officer Brian McGee. “This diversified approach to production can benefit our business regardless of tariff implications.” President Donald Trump threatened Sept. 17 to "immediately pursue" a fourth tranche on $267 billion if China retaliated for duties that took effect Sept. 24. China did retaliate, but Trump never acted. GoPro didn’t comment Tuesday on where it’s moving production.

DOJ’s Antitrust Division is withdrawing its agreement to a 2013 policy statement on patents subject to voluntary fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory (FRAND) terms. Created by DOJ and the Patent and Trademark Office, it hasn’t “accurately conveyed our position about when and how patent holders should be able to exclude competitors from practicing their technologies,” Assistant Attorney General Makan Delrahim said Friday at the Berkeley-Stanford Advanced Patent Law Institute in Palo Alto, California. He said DOJ will work with PTO on a new statement. Delrahim said standard-setting organizations (SSOs) “may make it too easy for patent implementers to bargain collectively and achieve sub-optimal concessions from patent holders that undermine the incentive to innovate.” There's a potential antitrust problem where a group of product manufacturers within an SSO “come together to dictate licensing terms to a patent holder as a condition for inclusion in a standard because it may be a collective exertion of monopsony power over the patent holder,” the antitrust chief said, saying such collusion can undermine innovation. As the American National Standards Institute considers creating a sample patent letter of assurance form that SSOs could use, he said the Antitrust Division has been in touch with ANSI to ensure “its efforts do not stifle competition among the standard-setting organizations.” ANSI didn’t comment.

Vizio’s Smartcast system for beaming content to a TV through a smartphone app violates two patents for manipulating wireless content from a mobile device, alleged a complaint (in Pacer) Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Santa Ana, California. Before patents 9,547,981 (granted in January 2017) and 8,135,342 (March 2012), “state of the art cell phone designs emphasized their use as standalone devices,” alleged Sockeye Licensing, which owns both patents. The patents “taught particular methods by which the cell phone could connect with and control a higher resolution display device, streaming video thereto,” it said. Each Vizio Smartcast TV “includes casting circuitry that provides a screen mirroring or casting functionality,” it said. “This allows a user to cause a Netflix movie to be downloaded from a Netflix server to the user’s smartphone, and then wirelessly cast from the smartphone to the casting circuitry for display on the TV,” violating the two patents, it said. Vizio didn’t comment Wednesday.

Inventors globally filed 3.17 million patent applications in 2017, a 5.8 percent increase from 2016 and the eighth straight year of increases, reported the World Intellectual Property Organization Monday. China’s IP office received the highest number of patent applications in 2017, a record 1.38 million, said WIPO. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office was second (606,956 applications), followed by Japan (318,479), South Korea (204,775) and the European Patent Office (166,585), it said. Patents in force worldwide grew 5.7 percent to 13.7 million in 2017, including 2.98 million in the U.S., 2.09 million in China and 2.01 million in Japan, it said. “Demand for IP protection is rising faster than the rate of global economic growth, illustrating that IP-backed innovation is an increasingly critical component of competition and commercial activity,” said WIPO. “In just a few decades, China has constructed an IP system, encouraged homegrown innovation, joined the ranks of the world’s IP leaders and is now driving worldwide growth in IP filings.”