Huawei changes its patent story

Posted: April 6, 2020 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , | 2 Comments

By opening up its massive patent portfolio to Linux and open-source companies via the Open Invention Network, Huawei shows just how important open patents are to software development. It’s also an intellectual property peace offering to the US government and businesses.

By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols for Linux and Open Source

April 3, 2020 — 20:05 GMT (04:05 GMT+08:00) | Topic: Mobility

On the one hand, Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei is warring with the US over trade sanctions, including suing Verizon over its misuse of its patents. Verizon has replied that Huawei is taking “credit for American innovation” with baseless suits over “outdated and valueless” patents. But, on the other hand, Huawei just opened up its more than 56,000 patents to Linux and open-source companies by joining the Open Invention Network (OIN). What’s going on here?

For background, you should know that Huawei’s patent portfolio is both enormous and, especially in 5G, comprehensive. Statia reports Huawei Is leading the 5G patent race with 3,147 patents. If you want to deploy 5G technology, you must deal with Huawei.

It’s not just 5G tech. In 2019, Huawei was granted the most patents in the EU and was a top 10 recipient in the US. The company is, in every sense of the word, a major telecommunications player.

In addition, while not a household name in the US, Huawei overtook Ericsson in 2012 as the world’s largest telecommunications-equipment manufacturer. In 2018, Huawei moved ahead of Apple as the second-largest manufacturer of smartphones in the world. Only Samsung is larger.

But, in May 2019, the US government added Huawei to its entity list. This prohibits US companies from transferring technology to Huawei without a government license. And it has led to Google suspending the use of parts of the Android OS on Huawei devices, including such key apps as Play Store and Maps.

I suspect Huawei is trying to accomplish several objectives by joining the OIN. One of them is that, by opening up much of its patent portfolio to open-source companies, it’s offering an olive branch to US-based companies. For example, AT&T Intellectual Property LLC, Google, and Verizon are all already OIN members.

After all, as Andrew “Andy” Updegrove, standards and patent expert and founding partner of top-technology law firm Gesmer Updegrove, pointed out in an interview:

“The global business community would generally prefer that business with Huawei could just go on as usual. Huawei and its affiliates are the acclaimed leaders in 5G technology, and the rest of the commercial world wants to have access to that technology, and also to be able to interoperate with it. In other words, to the extent that western companies agree with the US administration the risks, they have decided that the rewards outweigh those risks and are willing to accept them — as most recently evidenced by the news yesterday relating to how many US components are finding their way into Chinese handsets.”

Specifically, there are US parts in Huawei’s just-released P40 Pro.

So, what will Huawei joining the OIN mean for existing intellectual property (IP) conflicts and lawsuits remains to be seen. At the very least, it opens up entirely new conversations going forward with how companies and countries will work with Huawei.

Updegrove continued:

It doesn’t surprise me that Huawei would wish to join OIN, or that OIN would be happy to have Huawei aboard. There are hundreds of standards organizations that would love to have Huawei be able to participate as well, but the great majority have concluded that this can’t happen unless and until either the standards organizations change their rules, or the BIS [The Bureau of Industry and Security] creates a safe harbor that would make this unnecessary. Open-source projects operate under a much more transparent process than do standards organizations, and this has allowed Huawei to continue to participate in many important open-source projects.

There’s another reason for Huawei’s move. Open source has won. Almost all important software development is now done with open source and Huawei’s a part of that world.

In addition, Updegrove observed, “It’s also possible that Huawei is taking this action at this time to burnish its image as a team player in the open-source ecosystem while it is under attack by the US government.”

Heather Meeker, a partner at the law firm O’Melveny & Myers who specializes in open-source software licensing, remarked:

“This move just demonstrates that joining OIN has become a no-brainer for any product company. Setting aside the patent trolls, who would never have an incentive to join, no one is asserting patents against Linux anymore. Waging a patent war against a popular open-source project like Linux is bad for business.”

That said, Meeker continued:

“Of course, the OIN definition of Linux is far broader than the kernel. Even so, the OIN pool protects the basic infrastructure of the web, and no serious product company has an interest in disrupting it. That would be like sabotaging the roads we all drive on.”

Source zdnet.com “Huawei changes its patent story”

Note: This is zdnet.com’s article I post here for readers’ information. It does not mean that I agree or disagree with the article’s views.

China erodes US dominance in tech with an avalanche of patents

Posted: May 11, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 6 Comments

Published May 10, 2019, 4:26 pm SGT

WASHINGTON (BLOOMBERG) – The US is losing its advantage to China and other countries when it comes to innovations related to artificial intelligence, blockchain and other key technology, according to an analysis of patent filings over the past decade.

While American inventors still command the largest portion of the nation’s patents, the percentage is dropping in the high-tech fields, according to a year-long study conducted by the law firm Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton LLP and researchers at GreyB Services Pte.

That could lessen any home-field advantage in areas like wireless phones, Internet of things and artificial intelligence, the study’s authors said.

US applicants filed 66 per cent of patents for artificial intelligence in 2018, down from 78 per cent in 2007.

The percentage of filings for so-called Internet of things fell to 59 per cent last year, from 66 per cent a decade ago, while financial technology dropped to less than 75 per cent from 82 per cent.

“We are filing more; they’re just filing more, more quickly,” said Dr Kate Gaudry, a patent lawyer with Kilpatrick Townsend in Washington and one of the study authors.

“In a lot of high tech areas and in software, we’re seeing a decrease of contributions.”

The report comes as Beijing’s top trade negotiator, Mr Liu He, is in the US for high-stakes trade talks and as President Donald Trump raised tariffs on Chinese goods early on Friday (May 10).

The administration contends that China is stealing American know-how, and the trade talks centre in part on claims China has reneged on pledges to end a policy that requires US companies to reveal proprietary technologies and other intellectual property if they want to do business in the Asian nation.

The Chinese government, however, has spent billions to fund research in key technologies and the increase in patent filings indicates Chinese companies are developing their own technology as well.

Dr Robert Atkinson, president of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington-based non-profit that says it is devoted to policies that accelerate innovation, said what the US needs is a coherent innovation policy.

“We do not have one, at all. Zero,” he said.

The report, he said, is “a canary in a coal mine, telling us a pretty important message that we’re resting on our laurels”.

The study looked at filings with the US Patent and Trademark Office between 2007 and 2018.

Rather than relying on the agency’s traditional classification numbering system, the researchers considered wording within the patents to see what industries were related.

The number of patents sought and received has risen over the past decade in each of the 12 fields studied.

Areas where American companies retained or increased their dominance included medicines, industrial design and computational biology, which includes statistics used in genomics research and personalised medicine.

The biggest drop-off was in the area of Internet of things, which encompasses Internet-connected products that send and receive data, like smart home appliances, traffic devices and energy grids.

Overall, patent filings in the field are “skyrocketing”, from about 5,000 in 2007 to more than 18,000 in 2018, according to the report.

At the same time, the percentage of Internet of things applications that originated with American companies dropped to less than 60 per cent, with the biggest growth from companies in South Korea and China.

South Korea’s Samsung Electronics Co, one of the top recipients of those patents, is building model homes in Seoul to show off the possibilities of a completely connected homes, though Qualcomm Corp and International Business Machines Corp are among the top-five patent holders in the field.

The US National Institute of Standards and Technology, which overseas policies related to the licensing of government-funded research, last month laid out what it called “the critical need to modernise the US system of technology transfer and innovation” and acknowledged that “the US is continuing to lose ground to competition”.

In many categories, large American companies are the biggest holders of patents – Alphabet Inc’s Google is prominent in artificial intelligence, Boston Scientific Co is a leader in medical device-related patents and General Electric Co was tops in both green technology and bioinformatics.

While Bank of America Corp has the most patents related to blockchain, the ledger technology used for verifying and recording transactions, Japanese and Chinese companies have been increasing their percentage.

IBM, the developer of the Watson computer, was the top overall recipient of patents in artificial intelligence, but smaller companies are dominant within sub-groups, like Florida-based Magic Leap Inc in augmented reality and Texas-based CognitiveScale for augmented intelligence in the financial areas.

“They have a lot more employees, so they should have more patents coming out,” Dr Gaudry said of the big companies.

Some of the growth in patenting particularly from Chinese firms can be related to globalisation and the maturation of companies that want to operate in the US, she said.

While China’s network-gear company Huawei Technologies Co and display-screen maker BOE Technology Group weren’t named in the report, both ranked among the top 20 recipients of US patents last year.

Patents give their owners the exclusive right to use an invention. Particularly in the tech space, they also are used as a sort of bulwark to deter competitors from filing suit for fear of starting a tit-for-tat war.

“They want to be here,” Dr Gaudry said. “Some companies who want to come to the US even buy patents because they see it as necessary to operate.”

As the foreign companies seek more US patents in high-tech fields, the percentage assigned to American companies will continue to drop, she said.

“What is the impact on our competitiveness?” asked engineering professor Sridhar Kota of the University of Michigan. “Are we creating national wealth in the industries of the future? That is questionable, particularly when it comes to hardware.”

Minister for Science and Technology Wang Zhigang stressed the softer aspects of Beijing’s innovation drive, such as a greater focus on talent development and giving scientists and institutions more freedom.

Prof Kota, who also is executive director of MForesight: Alliance for Manufacturing Foresight, which advocates for policies to increase manufacturing in the US, said too many American companies that originally went to Asia for manufacturing also are turning there for research, engineering and design.

He pointed to things like cellular telephones, lithium batteries and flat panel displays.

“They were invented in the US, but not manufactured in the US, and now we don’t have the know-how to manufacture the next generation,” Prof Kota said. “If you are not manufacturing, you lose that entire knowledge of ‘learning by doing’. You lose the ability to develop the next generation of products.”

Dr Gaudry said it’s likely that an analysis of the patent filings in China would see an increased presence of US companies there as well because of globalisation, though Chinese firms would be tops in their home country.

In the European Patent Office, American companies make up 25 per cent of the total, according to that agency’s annual report.

Even there, though, the Chinese companies are seeking more patent protection.

“We’re declining and the patent data is telling us that’s what’s going on,” Dr Atkinson said. “That, to me, is a problem.”

Source: Strait Times “China erodes US dominance in tech with an avalanche of patents”

Note: This is Strait Times’report I post here for readers’ information. It does not mean that I agree or disagree with the report’ views.

Trade war or not, China is closing the gap on U.S. in technology IP race

Posted: April 13, 2018 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , , , | 14 Comments

Marius Zaharia April 13, 2018

HONG KONG (Reuters) – China’s rising investment in research and expansion of its higher education system mean that it is fast closing the gap with the United States in intellectual property and the struggle to be the No.1 global technology power, according to patent experts.

While U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat of punitive tariffs on high-tech U.S. exports could slow Beijing’s momentum, it won’t turn back the tide, they say. Washington’s allegation that the Chinese have engaged in intellectual property theft over many years – which is denied by Beijing – is a central reason for the worsening trade conflict between the U.S. and China.

Forecasts for how long it will take for Beijing to close the technological gap vary – though several patent specialists say it could happen in the next decade. And China is already leapfrogging ahead in a couple of areas.

“With the number of scientists China is training every year it will eventually catch up, regardless of what the U.S. does,” said David Shen, head of IP for China at global law firm Allen & Overy.

Indeed, IP lawyers now see President Xi Jinping’s pledge earlier this week to protect foreign IP rights as projecting confidence in China’s position as a leading innovator in sectors such as telecommunications and online payments, as well as its ability to catch up in other areas.

Last year, China overtook Japan as the No. 2 patent filer in the world, with 13.4 percent annual growth, according to the World Intellectual Property Organisation. If maintained, the pace will take it above the United States in just over a year, a strong indication of its ambitions.

That progress has been built on foundations which are likely to strengthen further.

China now spends 2.1 percent of its gross domestic product on research and development, not yet matching U.S. levels of 2.75 percent, but a remarkable increase from just 0.7 percent in the 1990s and nearing the 2.35 percent average among members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

World Bank data shows China now produces 1,177 R&D researchers per million of its population, three times the level in the 1990s and in line with the world average. The U.S. produces many more researchers per million – at 4,321 – but that is more than offset by China’s population being about four times the size.

And the number of Chinese researchers is only going to increase.

According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation, China now enrols more than 40 percent of its students in tertiary education, half the U.S. percentage, but a staggering rise from 0.1 percent in the 1970s.

“If you’re looking out 5-10 years you’ll see a much more level playing field in terms of innovation, especially around online platforms, digital innovation, machine learning and artificial intelligence,” said Richard Titherington, chief investment officer for Asian emerging markets at J.P. Morgan Asset Management, who overseas $80 billion in assets.

Titherington says online payments is the clearest example where China has leapfrogged the United States, with mobile phones replacing credit cards almost entirely as a form of payment in major Chinese cities, while “many Americans still use cheques.”

He said that stock markets provide one sign of Chinese progress – at least in the eyes of investors. The total returns on Facebook Inc stock since its listing in 2012 were 373 percent, versus 883 percent for its Chinese social media rival Tencent Holdings. In microblogging, Twitter Inc returned a 28 percent loss since its 2014 listing, while Weibo Corp a whopping 656 percent gain.

IP experts, however, say China is still behind in areas such as semiconductors, robotics, and biotech.

QUALITY GAP

Patent numbers also do not tell the whole story. There is a perceived gap in quality, which suggests China will take a while longer to catch up.

Smartphone maker Huawei Technologies is the only Chinese company that made it into Clarivate Analytics’ top 100 innovators last year, a ranking based not only on patent volumes, but also on their influence on other organizations.

In 2016, China produced almost 500,000 scientific papers according to data from global information analytics firm Elsevier, taking the No.2 spot globally and closing in on America’s 600,000. The gap has halved in five years.

But on average, a Chinese paper gets 0.93 citations, versus 1.23 for U.S. documents. Citations are an indication of how valuable a researcher’s work is seen by his or her peers.

On that metric, China is 11 places behind the United States in 33rd, with only countries that published more than 10,000 papers included. Gabriela Kennedy, head of Asia IP at global law firm Mayer Brown JSM, says that could be a proxy for the quality of each country’s research work.

“(The Chinese) are very successful in what they’re doing in some large companies, but if you look beyond that they’re not particularly innovative,” Kennedy said. “But I don’t think it’s going to take them long.”

If Washington wants to slow China’s technological advance, it might consider measures that further restrict what products U.S. companies license to Chinese firms and broaden definitions of trade secrets, lawyers say.

But they also warn tougher rules could be counterproductive as firms can find ways around them, including by setting up entities in non-U.S. jurisdictions to maintain access to the vast Chinese market.

“If the U.S. government were to go to the extreme of not allowing U.S. companies to disclose their IP in China, that could hurt the U.S. companies as well,” said Ling Ho, a partner with law firm Clifford Chance, and a specialist in IP disputes.

POLITICAL WILL

Xi pledged on Tuesday China will protect the intellectual property of foreign firms, saying he hoped foreign countries did the same.

Lawyers say Chinese IP protection laws are comparable to U.S. and European legal standards. The fault is in implementation, with high levels of bureaucracy, court decisions applying on a provincial level rather than nationally and judges often having different interpretations of the laws.

The recent creation of a State Intellectual Property Office, however, shows political intent and should lead to more uniform enforcement, said Loke-Khoon Tan, head of the IP Practice Group in Hong Kong and China at Baker McKenzie and author of the book “Pirates in the Middle Kingdom: The Art of Trademark War”.

“The political will is articulated in a very powerful way and once it’s communicated to each of the bureaucracies lower down I expect very positive things,” he said. “Our clients would be more encouraged and incentivised to test their cases.”

For a graphic on the tech race: tmsnrt.rs/2Hfu2h1

For a graphic on R&D spending: tmsnrt.rs/2GV8zKR

Additional reporting by Adam Jourdan in Shanghai, Jan Wolfe in New York and Jim Finkle in Toronto; Editing by Martin Howell

Source: Reuters “Trade war or not, China is closing the gap on U.S. in technology IP race”

Note: This is Reuters’ report I post here for readers’ information. It does not mean that I agree or disagree with the report’ views.