Federal district court decisions
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.
Judge Vince Chhabria ruled that Meta’s use of copyrighted books to train its Llama large language model constitutes fair use, finding the purpose highly transformative and rejecting plaintiffs’ market-harm theory—though he flagged a “market dilution” theory that, if properly argued, might have succeeded.
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.
A Delaware federal court held that Ross Intelligence’s use of Westlaw headnotes to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use — the first major U.S. court decision to find that AI training on copyrighted material for a directly competing product is direct copyright infringement.