The Canadian Federal Court of Appeal upheld the invalidation of THERME-formative trademark registrations, holding that marks comprising English words may be refused if descriptive when pronounced in French.
A federal judge denied most of NVIDIA’s motion to dismiss a class action alleging the company trained AI models on pirated books, finding that dataset download scripts ‘have no other purpose than to speed up the process of infringement’ and that the Supreme Court’s Cox ruling does not shield NVIDIA from contributory liability.
The Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction barring a venture lender from interfering with Google’s royalty-free license to manufacture specialized computer chips, affirming that Google’s licensing rights survived the shutdown of its startup partner CNEX Labs.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that a patent for automatically silencing a mobile phone when it pairs with a vehicle is directed to the abstract idea of screening notifications and lacks an inventive concept under Alice.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that Enviro Tech’s poultry-processing patent was invalid because the term “about” in its pH range limitations failed to inform skilled artisans of the claim scope with reasonable certainty.
The Delhi High Court granted an interim injunction restraining EaseMyBiz Technologies from launching its app or website, finding the name deceptively similar to MakeMyTrip’s established “MyBiz” corporate travel brand.
A Delaware federal court denied Zoom’s motion to dismiss Ricoh’s seven-patent infringement suit under Alice, finding the video conferencing patents plausibly contain inventive concepts beyond abstract ideas.
The UPC Central Division in Milan revoked the Academy of Military Medical Sciences’ European patent on the use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19, finding the claimed invention lacked inventive step because prior art published just ten days before the priority date already identified remdesivir as likely effective against the newly emerged Wuhan coronavirus.
Japan’s IP High Court voided a trademark registration for “AI Announcer,” ruling the term is merely descriptive of AI-powered automated news-reading software and cannot be monopolized.
USPTO Director John Squires ordered the PTAB’s Delegated Rehearing Panel to review a decision invalidating a web-design patent, finding the Board gave ‘no explanation’ for diverging from a $170 million jury verdict that upheld the same patent on substantially similar evidence.
An Oregon federal judge denied Columbia University’s motion to dismiss for lack of personal jurisdiction and denied its motion to transfer, allowing Columbia Sportswear’s trademark infringement and breach-of-coexistence-agreement claims to proceed in Oregon.
A federal court partially excluded Carnegie Mellon’s patent damages expert in a hard-disk drive patent case, finding her royalty calculations improperly included time-barred infringement and failed to apportion damages between patented and unpatented features.
The UK Patents Court set a $392 million lump-sum FRAND balancing payment for a global SEP cross-license between Samsung and ZTE, largely discounting prior ZTE licenses negotiated under the shadow of U.S. sanctions as non-FRAND comparables.
A California federal court ruled that a Houston attorney who served as outside counsel to Schrader Cellars has no ownership interest in the winery or its RBS wine brand, rejecting his claim of a decades-old handshake deal.
In a remarkable reversal of its own prior reversal, the Tenth Circuit unanimously held that Netflix’s use of a 66-second funeral clip in the Tiger King docuseries was fair use, finding all four statutory factors favor the defendants.
Following a $13 million jury verdict for trade secret misappropriation, a Texas federal court granted a permanent injunction but significantly narrowed its scope, and required plaintiffs to elect between overlapping damages theories to avoid double recovery.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s finding that Wildseed Mobile’s targeted mobile advertising patent claims are unpatentable as obvious, rejecting the patent owner’s narrow construction of ‘information taken from a message.’
A Northern District of California court dismissed six AI bot patents as ineligible under Alice but spared a seventh — a real-time translation patent — finding its claims specified how a remote server achieves multilingual group communication, rather than merely claiming the abstract idea of translation.
A New Jersey federal judge awarded Benjamin Moore $4.2 million in unpaid trademark royalties from its former Moroccan licensee and reversed his own earlier decision to allow the licensee’s trade secret and tortious interference counterclaims.
The CJEU held that a retirement home’s retransmission of satellite TV and radio signals to residents’ rooms via internal cable does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, because residents are not a ‘new public’ beyond the original broadcast audience.
A California federal court dismissed Brandy Melville’s Lanham Act and unfair competition claims against Shein, finding they were preempted by the Copyright Act because they merely recast copyright infringement allegations as trademark claims.
In a precedential decision, the TTAB cancelled Everwise Credit Union’s trademark registration after finding the credit union filed its statement of use before actually using the mark in commerce, while still operating under its former Teachers Credit Union brand.
A federal court dismissed Eli Lilly’s Lanham Act false advertising claim against Empower Pharmacy over compounded tirzepatide (the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound) for lack of proximate causation, but allowed state consumer protection claims to proceed in eight states.
The Second Circuit held for the first time that ‘misconduct’ under Rule 60(b)(3) does not include merely negligent discovery failures, and affirmed denial of Adidas’s motion to reopen a jury verdict favoring Thom Browne’s four-stripe activewear designs.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that Cisco’s products do not infringe three Centripetal network security patents, reaching the opposite result from the original bench trial that was vacated due to the judge’s failure to disclose his wife’s Cisco stock ownership.
A New York federal court denied Deloitte’s motion to dismiss trade secret misappropriation claims alleging the consulting giant posed as a partner to steal proprietary vaccine-tracking software and then used it to secure an $80 million CDC contract.
An Illinois federal court dismissed the trespass to chattels claim in a dispute over a browser extension that displays price comparison popups over e-commerce sites, continuing the long line of “website framing” cases.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that a patent for monitoring vehicles using RFID detection and operator identification is directed to the abstract idea of detecting, transmitting, and processing data, and lacks any inventive concept to survive Alice scrutiny.
The Federal Circuit affirmed PTAB’s construction of ‘short range’ as a relative term and upheld the invalidation of one claim, but vacated and remanded on four other claims where the Board failed to address FedEx’s argument about power management instructions.
The Seventh Circuit affirmed a $2,000 statutory damages award in a trademark counterfeiting and cybersquatting default case, holding that obtaining a default judgment alone does not excuse a plaintiff from proving up its damages request.
The UK High Court dismissed claims by the estates of Jimi Hendrix Experience members Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell, ruling that their 1966 recording agreement unambiguously assigned copyright to the producers and that prior releases barred all claims, including those related to streaming.
Two parallel N.D. Cal. rulings dismiss all claims—First Amendment, conspiracy, contract, and emotional distress—against Meta for suspending user accounts, holding that Section 230 immunizes platforms’ editorial decisions even when alleged to target political viewpoints.
The Ninth Circuit ruled that Section 230 bars claims by Rohingya plaintiffs alleging that Facebook’s algorithmic design fueled genocide in Myanmar, but two concurrences urged the court to reconsider the sweeping scope of the immunity.
The PTAB invalidated all challenged claims in two Maxell video processing patents, continuing Samsung’s campaign to dismantle the patent portfolio behind a $112 million E.D. Texas jury verdict that was already overturned on JMOL.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of claims by Rohingya plaintiffs alleging Facebook’s algorithm amplified anti-Rohingya violence in Myanmar, holding that Section 230 immunizes Meta from liability for algorithmically recommending third-party content — though two concurring opinions urged the court to reconsider its broad reading of Section 230.
In a precedential opinion, the Federal Circuit drew a sharp § 101 line between functional ‘optimization’ claims that recite a result without specifying a concrete configuration and ‘constellation’ claims that recite specific non-uniform point arrangements. It vacated summary judgment of eligibility for the former and affirmed eligibility for the latter, while affirming the underlying jury verdict, willful-infringement finding, and damages award against LG.
A Delaware federal judge denied Duracell’s motion to dismiss BASF’s trade secret claims over proprietary lithium-ion battery cathode technology, rejecting defenses of independent development and licensing.
The UK High Court ruled that the estates of Jimi Hendrix’s bandmates Noel Redding and Mitch Mitchell have no copyright ownership or performers’ property rights in approximately 40 studio recordings, finding the 1966 Recording Agreement unambiguously assigned worldwide copyright to producers.
A D.C. federal judge granted a preliminary injunction against a Canadian company selling competing nasal strip refills on Amazon, finding likely infringement of a magnetic nasal dilator patent and irreparable harm from price erosion and reputational damage.
Taiwan’s Intellectual Property and Commercial Court convicted four engineers and fined Tokyo Electron NT$150 million in the first-ever corporate conviction under Taiwan’s National Security Act, for theft of TSMC’s 2nm semiconductor process technology classified as a national core critical technology.
Taiwan’s Intellectual Property and Commercial Court convicted four engineers and fined Tokyo Electron NT$150 million for stealing TSMC’s advanced 2-nanometer chip manufacturing secrets, in the first corporate conviction under Taiwan’s amended National Security Act.
A Maryland federal judge ruled that a competitor’s published research report criticizing an ad verification company’s bot detection services may constitute ‘commercial advertising or promotion’ under the Lanham Act, allowing false advertising and defamation claims to proceed.
The Supreme Court denied certiorari in EscapeX IP v. Google, leaving in place a Federal Circuit decision affirming over $250,000 in attorney-fee sanctions against a patent plaintiff that pursued a ‘frivolous’ infringement suit against YouTube Music.
A federal court in North Carolina granted Joe Gibbs Racing a preliminary injunction barring former competition director Christopher Gabehart from retaining or using the team’s trade secrets, but declined to extend relief against his new employer, Spire Motorsports.
A Manhattan federal jury awarded $102 million to the Morgan Art Foundation after finding art dealer Michael McKenzie and American Image Art produced and sold thousands of unauthorized reproductions of Robert Indiana’s iconic LOVE artwork.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the jury’s $11.125 million verdict in a DSL standard-essential patent dispute, rejecting TQ Delta’s challenges to noninfringement and invalidity findings on two of its patents while upholding the damages award on four others.
In a consolidated order resolving three writ petitions, the Nevada Supreme Court applied its earlier TikTok and Snap decisions to reject Meta’s challenge to the State’s deceptive-trade-practices, products liability, negligence, and unjust enrichment claims over Messenger, Facebook, and Instagram — holding that personal jurisdiction was properly exercised and that neither Section 230 nor the First Amendment shields Meta from state-law claims aimed at platform design rather than third-party content.
A federal magistrate judge held that Section 230 immunizes X (formerly Twitter) from a premium subscriber’s claims that the platform amplified harmful content via its recommendation algorithm and suppressed the subscriber’s own posts, rejecting the argument that algorithmic curation falls outside Section 230’s protections.
A federal judge in San Francisco barred OpenAI, Sam Altman, and Jony Ive from using the ‘IO’ mark for AI hardware devices, finding iyO Inc. likely to succeed on its trademark infringement claim where the marks differ by only one letter and are pronounced identically.
The Federal Circuit reversed summary judgment of noninfringement as to one version of Google’s Content ID system, finding genuine disputes of material fact remain over whether the system performs a ‘sublinear’ search as required by Network-1’s video fingerprinting patent.