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.”

The Patent and Trademark Office’s 2018-22 plan Thursday prioritizes strengthening the PTO. Director Andrei Iancu's goals include "optimizing patent quality and timeliness" and "trademark quality and timeliness," and "domestic and global leadership to improve IP policy, enforcement, and protection worldwide.”

U.S. District Judge Paul Oetken in Manhattan ordered sealed Wednesday an unspecified contract complaint that LG Electronics filed against St. Lawrence Communications, owner of patents germane to the adaptive multi-rate wideband (AMR-WB) speech codec for cellphones, court records (in Pacer) show. SLC filed 10 patent infringement complaints against various carriers and smartphone OEMs since 2014, all but one in U.S. District Court in Marshall, Texas, records show. In a November 2014 complaint (in Pacer), SLC accused LG of violating five patents on AMR-WB-enabled HD Voice technology. LG countersued (in Pacer) in August 2015 seeking declaratory judgments that it was innocent of infringement and accusing SLC of licensing its patents on terms that weren't fair, reasonable and nondiscriminatory. LG and SLC appeared to settle that dispute in January 2016, records show. Neither company commented Wednesday.

Music Modernization Act notice of inquiry comments split between those urging the Copyright Office to make it easy for the public to search sound recordings to determine if they are available for noncommercial use and those wanting a more complex search process. MMA establishes a safe harbor for noncommercial use of pre-1972 sound recordings. Comments were posted Tuesday in docket COLC-2018-0008. Public Knowledge Policy Council Meredith Rose urged the CO to make an MMA checklist “accessible and comprehensible to non-specialists, and to make it as simple as allowed by the statute.” While PK proposed the CO require users “search no more than one to two services,” the American Association of Independent Music and RIAA proposed “dividing the various sources that users should search into different categories and then requiring all users to search in all categories (until a match is found).” The MMA process “doesn’t allow for any negotiation between the user and rights owner,” the groups said, urging it be used as “last resort.” SoundExchange endorsed the A2IM-RIAA comments. Noting noncommercial users under statutory licenses differ from noncommercial use in the context of fair use, RIAA said CO guidance should be clear. IFPI said to protect sound recordings originating outside the U.S. the process should include searches in “the country of origin of the sound recording in question” and in the language of origin. The Internet Archive recommended the process “entail performing a few high quality searches on a small number of large services rather than performing a low quality search across a large number of services.” Also filing were the Music Library Association, Library Copyright Alliance, Association of American Universities, Electronic Frontier Foundation and Copyright Alliance.

MPEG LA continues to "move forward" toward forming an ATSC 3.0 patent pool, "with hopes of having a pool license out early next year," emailed spokesperson Tom O'Reilly Tuesday. More than a dozen companies expressed interest in joining a 3.0 pool, O'Reilly told us earlier this year (see 1802170001). MPEG LA announced a call for 3.0-essential patents, the first step in the patent pool formation process, nearly 16 months ago.