Federal district court decisions
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 federal jury became the first in history to hold a pharmaceutical company liable for an anticompetitive pay-for-delay reverse-payment settlement, awarding $885 million in single damages—automatically trebled to more than $2.6 billion—against Takeda Pharmaceuticals for delaying generic competition for its IBS drug Amitiza, thirteen years after the Supreme Court’s FTC v. Actavis decision opened the door to such claims.
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.
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 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.
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 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 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 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 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 Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled that MEDDPICC — a widely used B2B sales qualification methodology — is a generic term that cannot be trademarked, ordering the USPTO to cancel the registration and dismissing all counterclaims with prejudice.
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.
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.