A federal judge denied Meta’s motion to dismiss copyright claims alleging the company used BitTorrent to acquire copyrighted works for AI training, finding that the torrenting process necessarily involved uploading the works and enabling third-party infringement.
Chief Judge Seeborg denied Meta’s motion to dismiss claims by investors who lost more than $300 million to a Chinese penny-stock scam advertised on Facebook and Instagram, holding that Meta’s generative-AI advertising tool ‘Advantage+ Creative’ — which actually produced some of the ad text and imagery — raised a plausible factual dispute on whether Meta materially contributed to the offending content and thus lost Section 230 immunity.
A Fayette County, Pennsylvania trial court refused to dismiss a wrongful-death suit against FareHarbor — the platform that managed a rafting outfitter’s website — holding that Section 230 does not immunize a defendant alleged to have helped develop the offending content.
Chief Judge Bashant’s amended summary-judgment order in The Upper Deck Co. v. Pixels.com draws a clean line through Section 230 for print-on-demand platforms: when Pixels acts as a website operator displaying and indexing user-uploaded images, Section 230 immunizes it; when Pixels acts as the manufacturer, seller, and shipper of physical prints containing those same images, Section 230 does not.
On the second trip up, the Ninth Circuit vacated most of the district court’s preliminary injunction against California’s Age-Appropriate Design Code Act — but kept the data-use and dark-patterns restrictions enjoined on vagueness grounds, leaving the statute partially in force.
An unpublished Ninth Circuit memorandum reverses the dismissal of product-liability, negligence, and NIED claims brought after two teenagers ingested sodium nitrite purchased from Amazon — but leaves intact the district court’s holding that Section 230 bars the part of the case premised on Amazon’s removal of warning reviews.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $600 million patent infringement judgment against Norton (Gen Digital), holding that Columbia University’s computer virus-detection patent claims are directed to abstract ideas under Alice Step 1, and denied en banc rehearing.
Case: Amazon.com Services LLC v. Perplexity AI, Inc., No. 25-cv-09514-MMC (N.D. Cal. Mar. 9, 2026) Court: U.S. District Court for
A Northern District of California judge dismissed two of three trademark infringement claims against AI startup Glean Technologies, finding that the plaintiff’s own registrations showed later first-use dates than the defendant’s alleged first use, while preserving the oldest mark with 2019 priority.
The Wisconsin Supreme Court joined a near-unanimous national consensus that an electronic service provider that scans user accounts for child sexual abuse material and reports its findings does so as a private actor, not a government agent — and that neither Section 230 nor 18 U.S.C. § 2258A converts that activity into state action.
A federal court denied Krisp Technologies’ motion for judgment on the pleadings, finding that Sanas.AI’s patents on real-time accent conversion using machine learning claim specific technical improvements rather than abstract ideas, distinguishing them from mere digital format conversion.
A Seattle federal jury returned a verdict for Valve Corporation on every count, finding inventor Leigh Rothschild and his affiliated entities and counsel violated Washington’s Patent Troll Prevention Act, breached a 2016 settlement and license, and that the asserted patent claim was obvious — in what may be the first jury verdict ever rendered under a state anti-patent-trolling statute.
A federal jury in Seattle returned a $152,093 verdict for Valve and against inventor Leigh Rothschild and his patent-licensing entities — finding violations of the Washington Patent Troll Prevention Act, the Washington Consumer Protection Act, and a 2016 patent licensing settlement. It is, according to the IP bar, the first jury verdict under a state anti-troll statute.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against celebrity fitness trainer Tracy Anderson, holding that the exercise sequences in her 19 fitness DVDs are functional routines — not expressive choreographic works — and therefore unprotectable under copyright law.
The UK Supreme Court unanimously overturned the Court of Appeal and held that an artificial neural network for recommending media files based on emotional characteristics is patentable, abandoning the Aerotel four-step test in favor of the EPO’s broader COMVIK approach — the most significant shift in UK computer-patent law in two decades.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that patents for sharing content using unique identifiers and location data are directed to an abstract idea and lack an inventive concept under Section 101.
Reviving claims against the online firearms marketplace Armslist, the First Circuit held that 16,000 New Hampshire firearm listings per year — viewed together with the site’s geographic-listing design and the advertising revenue those listings generated — were enough to make a prima facie case of purposeful availment. Section 230 was raised but not decided and remains open on remand.
Iowa’s Attorney General sued TikTok over what she alleges are deceptive ’12+’ age ratings in the Apple App Store. A unanimous Iowa Supreme Court held that TikTok’s contractual relationships with hundreds of thousands of Iowa users, plus its targeted advertising and Iowa-specific data collection, were more than enough to support specific personal jurisdiction.
The Tenth Circuit held that investigative costs qualify as “loss” under the CFAA even without any technological harm to computer systems or data, expanding the statute’s reach into ordinary information-misappropriation disputes.
The Fifth Circuit held that U.S. statutory copyright termination and renewal recapture worldwide rights, not just U.S. territorial rights — breaking with decades of consensus and creating a circuit-level fault line in international copyright law.
A Northern District of California court granted Pinterest summary judgment under DMCA Section 512(c), holding that the safe harbor protects user-generated images embedded in email, in-app, and push notifications because the underlying files remain stored on Pinterest’s servers regardless of how they’re displayed.
Judge Stein dismissed Ziff Davis’s DMCA Section 1201 anti-circumvention claim against OpenAI, holding that a robots.txt file is not a technological measure that ‘effectively controls access’ to a copyrighted work and that ignoring it does not constitute circumvention.
An Eastern District of New York judge denied Bemmo’s motion to dismiss Ridge Wallet’s patent infringement and trade dress claims, holding that claim construction disputes are premature at the pleading stage and that Ridge Wallet adequately alleged secondary meaning and non-functionality of its distinctive ‘Forged Ember’ design.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice held that the name of the James Bond character “Miss Moneypenny” does not enjoy independent work-title protection under § 5(1) and (3) German Trademark Act, because the fictional figure lacks the visual individuality and standalone fame required to be a work in its own right separate from the underlying James Bond film series.
In a same-day companion ruling to Meril v. Edwards, the UPC Court of Appeal articulated a comprehensive inventive-step framework: identify the objective problem from the perspective of the skilled person, choose a realistic starting point in the prior art, and assess whether the skilled person ‘would’ (not merely ‘could’) have arrived at the claimed solution. The decision also clarifies medical-use claim format, sufficiency, added matter, and burden of proof.
Same-day companion to Amgen v. Sanofi/Regeneron, the UPC Court of Appeal in Meril v. Edwards held that the ‘same parties’ test under Art. 33(4) UPCA looks to identity of interests; that disclosed embodiments are generally covered by the patent claims unless the specification clearly teaches otherwise; and importantly that an inventive step may be found even where the claimed solution is merely a ‘non-obvious alternative’ to known prior-art solutions.
A Pennsylvania federal court upheld a $28,000 jury verdict for Penn State in its long-running trademark suit against vintage-merch retailer Vintage Brand, treating initial interest confusion not as a standalone doctrine but as one way to satisfy the standard multi-factor confusion analysis.
Germany’s Federal Court of Justice dismissed Ferrari’s appeal challenging the “Testa Rossa” trademark, leaving in place the BPatG’s January 2025 ruling that bad-faith trademark applications under § 8(2) No. 10 MarkenG require objective evidence of damaging or obstructing intent — mere free-riding on a famous mark is not enough.
The Supreme Court declined to lift a D.C. Circuit injunction protecting the Register of Copyrights from presidential removal, leaving intact a ruling that the Register—as a legislative branch officer housed within the Library of Congress—cannot be fired by the Executive, even after SCOTUS expanded removal power over FTC and Federal Reserve officials the same week.
The UPC Court of Appeal set out a workable test for when a generic pharmaceutical’s pre-launch activity creates an imminent threat of infringement supporting provisional measures: a bare marketing authorisation does not, but completion of national health-technology-assessment, pricing, and reimbursement procedures can — depending on the regulatory and commercial context.
The Ninth Circuit held that NFTs qualify as ‘goods’ under the Lanham Act and reversed summary judgment for Yuga Labs on Bored Ape Yacht Club trademark and cybersquatting claims, finding genuine factual disputes for trial.
A New York federal court dismissed Donald Trump’s $50 million copyright suit against Bob Woodward and Simon & Schuster over The Trump Tapes audiobook, holding that interview recordings are unitary works authored by the recorder, not joint works.
Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train its Llama large language model constitutes fair use, finding the purpose highly transformative and rejecting plaintiffs’ market-harm theory—though he flagged a “market dilution” theory that, if properly argued, might have succeeded.
The Federal Circuit dismissed Dolby’s appeal of a favorable PTAB decision for lack of Article III standing, holding that a patent owner who wins an IPR cannot appeal to compel adjudication of a real-parties-in-interest dispute absent a concrete injury; the Supreme Court denied cert on June 22, 2026.
The Japan Intellectual Property High Court reversed the Tokyo District Court and held that a generic narlfrafen hydrochloride (nalfurafine) anti-itch product infringes Toray’s term-extended pharmaceutical use patent on Remitch, awarding the patentee approximately ¥21.7 billion (~US$140 million) in damages. The decision expansively defines the scope of extended Japanese pharmaceutical patents — covering generics with substantively identical active ingredient, dosage, usage, and indication, not merely formally identical products.
A Florida federal court denied most of Character.AI and Google’s motions to dismiss in a wrongful-death suit over a teenager’s interactions with an AI chatbot, allowing products-liability, negligence, FDUTPA, and aiding-and-abetting claims to proceed.
A Georgia trial court granted OpenAI summary judgment in a defamation suit over a ChatGPT hallucination, ruling that a reasonable user would not treat the chatbot’s output as a factual assertion in light of OpenAI’s hallucination warnings.
Korea’s Supreme Court affirmed dismissal of indirect patent-infringement claims against a domestic manufacturer that produced 13 individual conjugate substrates in Korea but exported them for final mixing into a 13-valent pneumococcal vaccine abroad, holding that under the territoriality principle of Korean Patent Act § 127(1), “production” must occur within Korean territory and a foreign-completed final assembly does not trigger Korean indirect-infringement liability.
France’s Cour de cassation held that when assessing trademark forfeiture for non-use under Article L.714-5 CPI, courts must analyze whether the proven use covers an autonomous sub-category of goods or services narrower than the registered category — looking to the purpose or destination of the products or services rather than being constrained by Nice classification headings.
The UPC Düsseldorf Local Division articulated the substantive framework for second medical-use claim infringement: the alleged infringer must offer or place the medicinal product on the market in a way that leads or may lead to the claimed therapeutic use, with knowledge or constructive knowledge that it does. Procedurally, the panel rejected “pleading ignorance” as a recognized form of defense, holding that the UPC Rules of Procedure do not acknowledge that pleading style.
The Federal Circuit held that inter partes review (IPR) estoppel bars only invalidity grounds based on patents or printed publications — not grounds based on physical prior-art products or systems. The ruling resolves a decade-long split among district courts and significantly limits how much challengers are foreclosed from arguing after an IPR.
The Supreme People’s Court IP Tribunal reversed a first-instance finding of patent infringement in a power-management chip dispute, holding that pulse-signal generation circuit features in the accused chip differed from the patented features in means, function, and effect — and therefore neither identically infringed nor were equivalent. The decision is the SPC’s most prominent 2025 elaboration of the doctrine of equivalents in logic-circuit patents.
The Paris Judicial Court issued France’s first major upcycling decision, holding that incorporating cut pieces of authentic Hermès silk scarves into Levi’s denim jackets — even when sold as commercial ‘upcycling’ — constitutes copyright infringement, trademark infringement, and unfair competition. The court rejected the argument that environmental sustainability operates as a defense to luxury IP rights.
Judge Stein largely denied Microsoft and OpenAI’s motion to dismiss the New York Times’s landmark copyright suit over GPT training, allowing contributory infringement, federal trademark dilution, and certain DMCA Section 1202(b)(1) CMI-removal claims to proceed.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that an award of “defendant’s profits” under the Lanham Act is limited to the profits of the named defendant entity and may not include profits of legally separate affiliated companies, unless those affiliates are alter egos or otherwise liable.
The CJEU Grand Chamber held that Article 4(1) of Regulation 1215/2012 entitles a court of a defendant’s domicile member state to hear infringement claims regarding a European patent’s national parts validated in other member states (and even in non-EU states), notwithstanding invalidity defenses raised under Article 24(4). The decision dramatically expands cross-border patent litigation in the EU and is the doctrinal foundation for the UPC’s long-arm jurisdiction over non-UPC-state patent rights.
A Delaware federal court held that Ross Intelligence’s use of Westlaw headnotes to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use — the first major U.S. court decision to find that AI training on copyrighted material for a directly competing product is direct copyright infringement.
The Supreme Court held that the Lanham Act’s restriction on registering marks that include a living person’s name without their consent is a content-based but viewpoint-neutral restriction that does not violate the First Amendment.
The Supreme Court held 6–3 that a copyright plaintiff who timely files under the discovery rule may recover damages for infringing acts occurring more than three years before filing, rejecting the argument that a separate three-year damages lookback window limits recovery.
The Federal Circuit reversed the PTAB’s obviousness finding against Virtek’s laser-alignment patent, holding that showing a skilled artisan had the knowledge to make a combination is insufficient for motivation to combine — there must also be a reason why they would have done so.