In the latest chapter of the 25-year Kraftwerk sampling dispute, the CJEU Grand Chamber held that the copyright ‘pastiche’ exception is not a catch-all but requires overt, recognizable artistic dialogue with the source work — with major implications for sampling, remix culture, and AI-generated content.
The CJEU Grand Chamber ruled that EU copyright’s ‘pastiche’ exception is not a catch-all defense but covers creations that use characteristic copyrighted elements to engage in recognizable artistic dialogue with existing works — a landmark holding for music sampling, remix culture, and AI-generated content across the EU.
A federal judge entered a $322 million default judgment against the shadow library Anna’s Archive for scraping and distributing millions of copyrighted sound recordings from Spotify, calling it one of the most horrendous acts of piracy he had seen.
The Federal Circuit reversed summary judgment of noninfringement of a multi-core processor patent, holding that a pretrial stipulation establishing a 70% U.S. nexus applied to infringement — not just damages — and that prosecution history did not clearly disclaim the broader scope of apparatus claims.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that U.S. Patent No. 8,458,689 — covering methods and apparatus for reprogramming automotive engine controllers — was invalid under the pre-AIA on-sale bar, holding that source code commands are not hearsay and that selling a device embodying a patented method triggers the bar even if the device’s inner workings were not publicly disclosed.
The Third Circuit affirmed denial of J&J’s preliminary injunction against Samsung’s sublicensing of a Stelara biosimilar to a Cigna subsidiary, holding that loss of market share in the biologics market does not categorically constitute irreparable harm in breach-of-contract cases.
Japan’s Intellectual Property High Court overturned the JPO’s invalidation of a key Broad Institute CRISPR patent, ruling that the institutions could validly claim priority from earlier U.S. filings despite a dispute over ownership of those priority rights.
The Northern District of California granted summary judgment of noninfringement, holding that ‘and’ in a patent claim is unambiguously conjunctive — both the metallic contact plugs and the front metal must exceed aluminum’s thermal conductivity.
A federal court in D.C. held that when a plaintiff sues for trademark infringement, the defendant may counterclaim for a declaratory judgment that the plaintiff lacks exclusive rights in a component term of the asserted marks — and that diverted donations suffice for standing.
A federal judge in Arizona granted a temporary restraining order preventing the state from prosecuting prediction market platform Kalshi under state gambling laws, finding the CFTC likely to succeed on federal preemption grounds.
In a landmark ruling, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court held that Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act does not immunize Meta from state-law claims that Instagram was deliberately designed to addict children — distinguishing platform design choices from third-party content moderation.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s finding that Universal Electronics’ voice-input remote control patent claims were unpatentable as obvious, in the latest chapter of the long-running patent battle between the two consumer electronics companies.
The Eleventh Circuit upheld DISH Network’s copyright infringement victory and $600,000 damages award against a Florida businessman who operated an unauthorized service retransmitting Arabic-language television channels.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the TTAB dismissal of cigar maker Fuente Marketing Ltd.s opposition to a vape-pen design mark, holding that despite overlapping goods and channels, the distinct commercial impression of Vaporous Technologies stick-figure design mark defeated likelihood of confusion with Fuentes standard-character X marks.
A Massachusetts federal court denied Abiomed’s motion for summary judgment of no infringement under the doctrine of equivalents, finding genuine disputes over whether differential and optical pressure sensors are equivalent to the fluid-column sensor claimed in Maquet’s intravascular blood pump patent.
The Third Circuit affirmed the denial of ASTM’s preliminary injunction, holding that UpCodes’ free online publication of copyrighted technical standards that have been incorporated by reference into building codes likely constitutes fair use — even though UpCodes is a for-profit company that reproduced the standards in full.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s finding that patent claims directed to operating an information exchange are ineligible abstract ideas under Section 101, holding that generic computing instructions lack an inventive concept.
The Third Circuit affirmed denial of a preliminary injunction, holding that UpCodes’ verbatim republication of copyrighted ASTM building standards incorporated into law likely constitutes fair use because its purpose — providing free public access to the law — is transformative.
The Federal Circuit dismissed ironSource’s appeal of a PTAB post-grant review decision, holding that ironSource failed to demonstrate Article III standing because its evidence did not address the substitute claims actually at issue.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the ITC’s finding that imported marine air conditioning systems did not violate Section 337, holding that the asserted patent claims were anticipated by prior art and the accused products did not infringe remaining claims.
In a case of first impression, the Federal Circuit held that patents listing incorrect inventors are invalid when the omitted coinventor cannot be found to receive the notice and hearing required by 35 U.S.C. Section 256(b).
The Federal Circuit held that patents omitting a true co-inventor are invalid when the error cannot be corrected under 35 U.S.C. § 256, because § 256(b) requires actual notice and opportunity to be heard — and a co-inventor who cannot be located cannot receive that notice.
A federal court in California dismissed Pepperdine University’s trademark suit against Netflix, holding that the fictional “Los Angeles Waves” basketball team in the Running Point series is protected artistic expression under the Rogers v. Grimaldi test.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.