Federal district court decisions
Eastern District of Pennsylvania holds that MEDDPICC — the widely used B2B sales methodology acronym — is generic, ordering cancellation of the trademark registration that had been used to take down social media posts and book listings.
Judge Gilstrap finds that Headwater Research LLC — which knew of Verizon’s patent infringement in 2017 but waited six years to file suit in order to maximize its damages window — engaged in conduct so inconsistent with an intent to enforce its rights that equity bars enforcement entirely, wiping out a $175 million jury verdict. The court holds that implied waiver survives the Supreme Court’s SCA Hygiene decision, which abolished laches, because waiver goes to liability rather than damages.
A Northern District of California court ruled that litigation funder Legalist, Inc. is not liable for attorney’s fees after the plaintiff’s trade secret case was dismissed as time-barred, holding that reviewing and approving only the initial complaint does not constitute sufficient control over the litigation.
After prevailing in a $25.6 million copyright case over CoComelon character infringement, Moonbug sought $933K in additional fees. The court denied appellate fees — finding BabyBus’s curated appeal was objectively reasonable — but awarded $280K for extraordinary judgment enforcement work necessitated by BabyBus’s use of a shell entity to divert funds.
In a dispute over PrepMod, a COVID-19 vaccination scheduling platform, the court ruled that the developer’s copyright infringement counterclaim survives but statutory damages and attorney’s fees are barred under 17 U.S.C. § 412 because the infringement began two years before registration.
A federal court denied a preliminary injunction that would have blocked the launch of California’s AwareCA wildfire alert platform, finding that the maker of the ‘Wildfire Aware’ app waited too long to seek emergency relief and failed to show likelihood of confusion.
After the Third Circuit vacated prior default judgments and remanded for reconsideration, the district court reinstated default judgment against Chinese companies selling counterfeit kitchen products, finding personal jurisdiction established through Amazon and AliExpress sales into the forum.
In a Markman claim construction order, the District of New Jersey construed nine disputed terms from two patents covering decorative lighting strings with spaced bulbs, setting the stage for infringement and validity analysis.
A Colorado federal court dismissed trademark and IP claims against Penn Entertainment and its Ameristar Casino subsidiary for the second time, finding that MAO Gaming’s complaint still failed to clearly distinguish which defendant was liable for the unauthorized use of the STREAK® blackjack brand.
A federal judge in San Francisco denied Databricks’ motion to dismiss copyright infringement claims alleging the company used pirated books to train its MPT and DBRX large language models, finding the authors sufficiently tied their works to the AI models.
Judge Donald Nugent dismissed all claims — negligence, strict liability, concealment, and misrepresentation — against Discord brought on behalf of a minor sexually exploited by an adult user, holding that the plaintiff’s “defective design” theory was a repackaged demand that Discord moderate or block third-party communications, which Section 230 forecloses.
Judge Timothy Brooks granted NetChoice’s preliminary-injunction motion against Arkansas Act 900, the General Assembly’s second attempt to regulate minors’ use of social media after the same court enjoined the predecessor Act 689 in 2025. Act 900’s addictive-practices ban, mandatory notification curfew, default privacy settings, and parental dashboard provisions all fall under First Amendment scrutiny.
A federal judge partially dismissed Eli Lilly’s Lanham Act false advertising claims against telehealth company Mochi Health over its marketing of compounded tirzepatide, the active ingredient in Mounjaro and Zepbound, while allowing some claims to proceed.
A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York partially granted both sides’ motions in a 3D scanning patent dispute, narrowing the case for trial while also partially excluding a defense expert’s testimony on technical grounds.
A Georgia federal court dismissed copyright infringement claims by the inventor of “key shadowing” quantum-resistant encryption technology against HyperSphere Technologies, the company to which he had assigned his patent, ruling he failed to adequately state a claim that his separately registered software code was infringed.
Judge Peterson carved up MCP IP’s ten-patent assault on the Ravin R500 crossbow: Ravin gets non-infringement summary judgment on six patents, MCP wins infringement and defeats invalidity on the ‘433 and ‘939 patents, and the court teed up show-cause briefing on three more.
Judge Gilstrap largely sided with NPE K.Mizra in a claim construction ruling on three networking patents asserted against Nokia, rejecting Nokia’s attempts to narrow key terms like “preemption” and “Virtual Switch Instance.”
Judge Saylor denied Maquet’s summary-judgment motion seeking to kill Abiomed’s prosecution-laches defense on the pigtail-tip claim of U.S. Patent 10,238,783, finding a genuine fact dispute over whether Maquet reasonably disclosed the pigtail feature during a 15-year prosecution delay.
Magistrate Judge Payne narrowed both sides’ expert testimony in a patent-assertion-entity dispute over whether a Cisco-Intel RPX license reaches EireOg’s ‘777 patent, allowing industry-structure opinions but excluding public-policy commentary and testimony on already-decided license theories.
The E.D. Cal. ordered supplemental briefing on whether Gallo’s sparse “one soil moisture sensor per 650 vines” setup falls within Vineyard Investigations’ plant-level irrigation patents, and invited Gallo to renew its § 101 eligibility challenge in light of post-2021 Federal Circuit authority.
A Delaware federal judge granted Google summary judgment on the last remaining claim of B.E. Technology’s targeted advertising patent, finding Claim 25 of U.S. Patent No. 8,769,440 directed to the abstract idea of providing real-time targeted advertising and lacking any inventive concept under the Alice/Mayo framework.
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.
After announcing 30,000 layoffs, Oracle secures a temporary restraining order barring a recently separated sales employee from disclosing trade secrets he had threatened to sell to the “highest bidder” absent an “unreasonable” fee. A primer on DTSA TRO practice in the RIF era.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.