Federal district court decisions
A D.C. federal judge denied motions to dismiss copyright infringement claims brought by a jury consultant against three defense attorneys who downloaded her copyrighted jury-attitude report from a public court docket and filed it in support of their own clients’ January 6 venue-transfer motions without permission or payment.
An Eastern District of Texas jury awarded SK nexilis $3.3 million after finding that Solus Advanced Materials and its Volta Energy subsidiaries willfully infringed five patents covering electrolytic copper foil manufacturing methods used in electric vehicle batteries.
A federal court in the Southern District of California dismissed all claims from five ad-viewability and ad-refresh patents as patent-ineligible under Section 101, finding they recite abstract ideas of determining whether a webpage area is visible and sending content based on that determination.
A federal court in the Eastern District of Missouri denied cross-motions for summary judgment in a trade secret case where departing employees allegedly prepared requests for proposals for a competitor while still employed, sending the case to trial on misappropriation and fiduciary duty claims.
A federal magistrate in Kansas recommended adverse inference sanctions against OPISystems for spoliation of evidence in a trade secret case involving stolen agricultural grain-bin management source code, after finding that a former employee stored proprietary code on personal devices and a competitor failed to preserve it.
A federal court in the Eastern District of California dismissed trademark infringement claims involving the ALIEN mark for nicotine products after the plaintiff failed, even on a second attempt, to adequately plead priority of use over the defendant’s ALIENLABS mark for cannabis products.
In a closely watched case, Judge Gilstrap denied a permanent injunction against Samsung despite a $445.5 million willful infringement verdict, finding that the non-practicing patent owner failed to show the balance of hardships favored relief — even though the court accepted its irreparable harm argument, supported by an unusual joint DOJ-USPTO Statement of Interest.
A federal judge enters a $19.5 million default judgment against shadow library Anna’s Archive and orders global registries to disable the site’s remaining domains, marking the second massive judgment against the piracy operation in 2026.
A New Jersey federal court denied a preliminary injunction in a dispute between competing waterfront restaurants, holding that a restaurant logo known only in a regional market is not ‘famous’ enough for federal trademark dilution protection.
An Ohio federal court entered a $1 million default judgment against a convicted counterfeiter who placed unauthorized NIJ certification marks on body armor sold to law enforcement, ordering permanent injunction and destruction of infringing goods.
In a patent litigation over cancer diagnostics, a federal court adopted sanctions totaling nearly $3 million against Quinn Emanuel and five named attorneys, plus a $100,000 punitive sanction and mandatory ethics training, for deliberately misleading the court about an expert’s access to embargoed clinical trial data.
A federal court in Texas entered a $12.97 million judgment and permanent injunction against Talaria for willfully infringing Surron’s design patent covering its popular Light Bee electric off-road motorcycle.
An Oregon federal court partially dismissed adidas’s trademark infringement claims, holding that plaintiffs must identify which specific registered marks are infringed rather than pleading a ‘unitary branding device’ across multiple registrations.
A Delaware federal judge upheld two patents covering UCB’s Nayzilam seizure medication after a bench trial, finding that Cipla failed to prove the patents invalid as anticipated or obvious—preserving UCB’s market exclusivity just as the drug’s orphan drug protection expired.
A federal court in Pennsylvania granted summary judgment to a photographer whose copyrighted image was republished without permission on a commercial dog breeder’s blog, rejecting the defendant’s fair use defense on all four statutory factors.
A federal judge in San Francisco granted GoPro judgment as a matter of law that the sole remaining valid patent claim covering its action camera live-preview technology was invalid, overturning an $8.2 million jury damages award in a case that has been litigated for over a decade.
A Delaware federal judge overturned the jury’s willfulness finding in Express Mobile’s $170 million patent verdict against GoDaddy over web-design technology, preventing potential treble damages while leaving the base verdict intact.
A federal judge awarded $74,950 in attorney’s fees and $17,670 in costs against LegalForce after finding the trademark firm alleged facts it knew to be false, including $10 million in promotional spending it could not substantiate with even one dollar.
A Los Angeles federal jury found Ye (Kanye West) and his companies liable for approximately $438,000 in damages for using the copyrighted instrumental track ‘MSD PT2’ without authorization in an early demo of ‘Hurricane’ performed at the 2021 Donda album listening party at Mercedes-Benz Stadium.
A federal court in Chicago denied BeiGene’s motion to dismiss AbbVie’s trade secret claims alleging that a former AbbVie scientist carried proprietary BTK degrader cancer drug designs in his memory to BeiGene, which then filed patent applications incorporating those designs within six months.
A federal district court dismissed defamation claims against WorldStarHipHop under Section 230, holding that downloading a third-party video and adding a new caption and tags constituted only ‘minor, paratextual modifications’ insufficient to strip platform immunity.
After the Ninth Circuit carved out ‘promise-based claims’ from Section 230 immunity, the district court grants summary judgment for Snap anyway, finding that content moderation statements are too vague to be actionable misrepresentations.
A federal judge dismissed a pro se plaintiff’s copyright infringement claim alleging Warner Bros. copied his screenplay for the Joker films, finding no plausible allegation of access and no substantial similarity between the works.
After a jury found Impossible Foods willfully infringed a smaller company’s IMPOSSIBLE trademark on apparel and a cookbook, a federal judge denied laches, awarded attorney fees, and permanently enjoined Impossible Foods from using ‘Impossible’ as a standalone mark on apparel and cookbooks.
A federal judge dismissed MITII’s patent infringement claims against OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video platform with prejudice, finding that four patents originally developed for autism-therapy technology do not cover OpenAI’s AI-powered video generation system.
A federal court denied Academia.edu’s Section 230 defense and rejected all four attempts to compel arbitration in a class action alleging the platform used professors’ names in commercial advertisements without consent.
A New Hampshire federal court denied Sig Sauer’s motion for summary judgment of noninfringement in a patent dispute over firearm stabilizing braces, finding genuine factual disputes that must be resolved by a jury.
In three pre-trial rulings, the District of Massachusetts denied summary judgment on Abiomed’s written description defense, eliminated its indefiniteness arguments, declined to kill the reverse doctrine of equivalents, and found waiver on a last-minute means-plus-function claim construction bid — setting the stage for trial on Maquet’s intravascular blood pump patent.
A Virginia federal judge cleared Amazon of infringement on four of five DivX video streaming patents, leaving only a tile-based video encryption patent for trial.
The District of Oregon construed four disputed terms in an e-learning patent, adopting a network-topology-based interpretation of ‘network-side’ and ‘client-side’ consistent with the patent holder’s own positions during inter partes review.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.