SEPs licensing across the supply chain: an antitrust perspective

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) and the development of 5G are set to add a new layer of complexity to the current practice of standard essential patents (SEPs) licensing. While, until recently, the debate has centred on the nature of fair, reasonable and non-discriminatory (FRAND) commitments and the mechanisms to avoid hold-up and reverse hold-up problems between licensors and licensees, a new hotly-debated issue has now emerged. At its core is the question of whether SEP holders should be required to grant a FRAND licence to any implementer seeking a licence, including component makers (the so-called ‘licence-to-all’ approach), or if they should be allowed freely to target the supply-chain level at which the licence is to be granted (the so-called ‘access-for-all’ approach). After providing an up-to-date overview of the current legal and economic debate, this article focuses on the most recent antitrust case law dealing with the matter on both sides of the Atlantic and argues that no sound economic and legal bases which favour licence-to-all solutions can be identified. * The authors would like to thank the anonymous referees, Luigi Federico Signorini and the participants in the 2021 Annual Conference of European Policy for Intellectual Property (EPIP), in the 38th Annual Conference of the European Law and Economics Association (EALE), in the TILTing Perspectives 2021 (Tilburg University), and in the 16th Annual Conference of the Academic Society for Competition Law (ASCOLA). The study was conducted as part of the research activities promoted by the DEEP-IN (Digital Ecosystem, Economic Policy and Innovation) Research Network. The author is grateful for the financial support received. Any opinions expressed in this paper are personal and are not to be attributed to the Bank of Italy. The first is Half-Causation Branching, which allows the logical mapping of the inventing space, within which the imaginary invention is located. Implementing this tool reveals two alternative nearby inventions, which if left out of the sought patent protection would render any eventually granted patent practically worthless. Following that, Half-Causation Encapsulation comes to the rescue by allowing the encapsulation of the original imaginary invention, plus the two alternative nearby ones, all in a manner that provides the all-important unity of invention On the one hand, patent agents are not supposed to contribute to their client’s inventive concept to the extent that they become co-inventors. On the other hand, scientists and engineers are not supposed to dedicate so much time and effort to learning about complex patent laws as to become patent agents. Arguably, each should aim to excel in their discipline. However, a structured dialogue should be considerably helpful to each and to the patent process as a whole. It is proposed that Half-Causation, with its logical structure, can provide a basis for such a dialogue. Besides targeting a readership in patent practices and theory, this paper should be of interest to multiple readerships, for example in engineering design, medical discovery and philosophy of technology.

How Half-Causation can enlighten the drafting of patent claims

The author’s 2019 article ‘If You Wish to Invent Then Follow the Half-Causation Method’ presented ‘Half-Causation’, which is a philosophical model for the systemization of the invention process. It consists of five phases of reasoning, each terminating with taking a ‘logical branch’. This paper has two objectives. The first (and preliminary) objective is to introduce a readership in patent practices (and theory) to Half-Causation. The second (and primary) objective is to highlight how Half-Causation can be practically useful to patent practitioners (and perhaps ultimately theorists), specifically in terms of enlightening the drafting of patent claims. In order to do this effectively, the reader is presented with a case which they can engage with to see for themselves how Half-Causation can help, step by step. The presented case was the subject of the USPTO’s 2019 patent drafting competition. It consists of rather convoluted instructions received from an ‘imaginary’ client about their ‘imaginary’ invention. The case is an excellent opportunity to illustrate how Half-Causation as a philosophical model can be practically useful. Two Half-Causation tools are implemented. The first is Half-Causation Branching, which allows the logical mapping of the inventing space, within which the imaginary invention is located. Implementing this tool reveals two alternative nearby inventions, which if left out of the sought patent protection would render any eventually granted patent practically worthless. Following that, Half-Causation Encapsulation comes to the rescue by allowing the encapsulation of the original imaginary invention, plus the two alternative nearby ones, all in a manner that provides the all-important unity of invention On the one hand, patent agents are not supposed to contribute to their client’s inventive concept to the extent that they become co-inventors. On the other hand, scientists and engineers are not supposed to dedicate so much time and effort to learning about complex patent laws as to become patent agents. Arguably, each should aim to excel in their discipline. However, a structured dialogue should be considerably helpful to each and to the patent process as a whole. It is proposed that Half-Causation, with its logical structure, can provide a basis for such a dialogue. Besides targeting a readership in patent practices and theory, this paper should be of interest to multiple readerships, for example in engineering design, medical discovery and philosophy of technology.

Quantitative analysis of combustion process of marine dual fuel engine under the framework of iconology

The methane (CH4) burning interruption factor and the characteristic values characterizing the flame combustion state in the engine cylinder were defined. The logical mapping relationship between image feature values and combustion conditions in the framework of iconology was proposed. Results show that there are two periods of combustion instability and combustion stability during the combustion of dual fuel. The high temperature region with a cylinder temperature greater than 1800K is the largest at 17°CA after top dead center (TDC), accounting for 73.25% of the combustion chamber area. During the flame propagation, the radial flame velocity and the axial flame velocity are “unimodal” and “wavy,” respectively. During the combustion process, the CH4 burning interruption factor first increased and then decreased. The combustion duration in dual fuel mode is 21.25°CA, which is 15.5°CA shorter than the combustion duration in pure diesel mode.

Extracting Semantic Information from Graphic Schemes

The problem of extracting semantic information from an electronic document specified in the vector graphics format and containing a graphic model (diagram) built using a graphic editor is considered. The problem is to program retrieving certain structural properties and parametric circuit and entering them into a database for later use. Based on the analysis of the capabilities of graphic editors, a conclusion has made about the relevance of this task for universal editors that are not tied to specific graphic notations and use open graphic document formats, which allows program processing. The proposed approach considers graphic documents at three levels of abstraction: conceptual (semantic properties of a schema), logical (presentation of semantic properties at the internal level of the document) and physical (internal organization of a graphic document). The solution to the problem is based on the construction of a conceptual-logical mapping, i.e., mapping a conceptual model of a circuit to a logical model of a graphic document, according to its physical model. Within the framework of the approach, an algorithm for constructing the indicated mapping is developed, presented in the form of an object-oriented pseudocode. The study of internal markup in open graphic formats made it possible to build models for identifying circuit elements and their connections to each other, which is necessary for a specific application of the algorithm. Expressions for addressing schema elements and accessing their properties are obtained. The proposed approach is implemented on the base of a situation-oriented paradigm, within which the extraction process is driven by a hierarchical situational model. The processed data is specified in the situational model in the form of virtual documents displayed on heterogeneous external data sources. For the problem being solved, we consider the mapping to two variants of vector graphics formats: to a "flat" markup file and to a set of such files in an electronic archive. The practical use of the results is illustrated by the example of extracting semantic information from graphical models developed at various stages of database design.

Encryption method and security analysis of medical images based on stream cipher enhanced logical mapping

BACKGROUND: Medical image security has been paid more attention in the medical field. OBJECTIVE: In order to achieve a higher security level of medical image encryption, this paper proposes a stream cipher enhanced logic mapping encryption method. METHODS: According to the theory of stream cipher, this method uses Chebyshev map to form encryption key. A series of coding operations are used to set the initial value before image chaos processing. Combining with logical mapping, the original image information is encrypted by chaos from X and Y dimensions. RESULTS: The experimental results show that the NPCR value of the encrypted image is 0.9874 after the blood cells are encrypted. CONCLUSIONS: All four evaluation methods fully prove that this method has excellent encryption performance.

Long-Term Hydropower Generation Scheduling of Large-Scale Cascade Reservoirs Using Chaotic Adaptive Multi-Objective Bat Algorithm

With growing concerns over renewable energy, the cascade hydropower reservoirs operation (CHRO), which balances the development of economic benefits and power supply security, plays an increasingly important role in hydropower systems. Due to conflicting objectives and complicated operation constraints, the CHRO problem considering the requirements of maximizing power generation benefit and firm power output is determined as a multi-objective optimization problem (MOP). In this paper, a chaotic adaptive multi-objective bat algorithm (CAMOBA) is proposed to solve the CHRO problem, and the external archive set is added to preserve non-dominant solutions. Meanwhile, population initialization based on the improved logical mapping function is adopted to improve population diversity. Furthermore, the self-adaptive local search strategy and mutation operation are designed to escape local minima. The CAMOBA is applied to the CHRO problem of the Qingjiang cascade hydropower stations in southern China. The results show that CAMOBA outperforms the multi-objective bat algorithm (MOBA) and non-dominated sorting genetic algorithms-II (NSGA-II) in different hydrological years. The spacing (SP) and hypervolume (HV) metrics verify the excellent performance of CAMOBA in diversity and convergence. In summary, the CAMOBA is demonstrated to get better scheduling solutions, providing an effective approach for solving the cascade hydropower reservoirs operation (CHRO).

Conceptual Metaphor of Eliot’s Waste Land Versus Al-Sayyab’s Rain Song

Of the rhetorical tools, metaphor still has insufficient interest, primarily as a crosscultural phenomenon though it is an attractive and vivid area, so it should be studied and highlighted (Suhadi, 2018) and (Barton, 2017). This comparative study investigated the conceptual metaphor in modern Arabic versus English poetry with reference to Al-Sayyab and T. S. Eliot as two poles of modern poetry in Arabic and English. This study tried to shed light on the frequency of the conceptual metaphors in Al-Sayyab’s The Rain Song versus Eliot’s The Waste Land. Besides, it aimed to explore the similarities and differences between the two poems in using the CMT orientational ’Up’ and ’Down’ strategy. However, to accomplish its aims, this study adopted Lakoff and Jonson’s Conceptual Metaphor Theory ’CMT’ (1980); this theory asserted that metaphor is an inborn mental system in which we understand a certain concept in terms of another by drawing a logical mapping between the source domain and the target one. Finally, the study found that modern poetry was wealthy of conceptual metaphors. It also discovered that The Rain Song involved 65.29% conceptual metaphors of its total lines, so it exceeded The Waste Land which comprised only 39.40%. Furthermore, the study revealed that the two poems were generally pessimistic in which the ’Down’ domain exceeded the ’Up’ one in each poem. Also, it detected that Eliot was more pessimistic than Al Sayyab who was more optimistic.

Dynamic Fault Tree Analysis Based on Dynamic Uncertain Causality Graph

Dynamic Fault Tree (DFT) has drawn attention from comprehensive industrial systems in recent years. Many analytical approaches are developed to analyze DFT, such as Markov Chain based method, Inclusion-Exclusion Rule based method, and Sum-of-Disjoint-Product theory based method. Novel methods such as Bayesian Network and Petri Net are also used to solve DFT. However, Basic events are usually assumed unrepairable and are restricted to specific probabilistic distributions. And some methods may suffer from combination explosion. This paper applies Dynamic Uncertain Causality Graph (DUCG) to analyze DFT to overcome the aforementioned issues. DUCG is a newly proposed Probabilistic Graphic Model for large complex industrial systems which allows for dynamics, uncertainties and logic cycles. The DUCG based methodology can be summarized as event mapping, logical mapping, and numerical mapping. This paper studies how to map the PAND, FDEP, SEQ AND SPARE sequential logic gates into equivalent representations in DUCG. With the DUCG representation mode, one can analyze DFT with algorithms in DUCG. Future work will be done on benchmark tests and on software development.