The Federal Circuit affirmed the dismissal of a pro se challenge to the PTO’s denial of micro-entity status, holding that inventors who admit they are obligated to assign their patent application lack Article III standing to contest the associated fee determination.
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 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.
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.
In a split decision, the Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s finding that most claims of Metrom Rail’s collision-avoidance patents are obvious, and reversed the Board’s ruling that had saved four remaining claims — holding that the Board applied an incorrect claim construction.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s exceptional-case finding and attorney fee award to Nextremity after an IPR invalidated Extremity Medical’s orthopedic implant patent, but denied fees for the IPR proceedings themselves.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the ITC’s final determination that Tineco’s redesigned wet-dry surface cleaning devices do not infringe Bissell’s patents, while upholding infringement findings against the original products.
In a historic first, the UPC Court of Appeal has referred four questions to the CJEU on whether UPC local divisions can assert long-arm jurisdiction over patent infringement occurring in non-UPC contracting states.
The U.S. International Trade Commission ordered import and sales bans on Innoscience’s gallium nitride semiconductor devices after finding infringement of Infineon’s patent covering advanced transistor packaging technology used in AI data centers and electric vehicles.
The ITC issued a final determination in a GaN semiconductor patent case, finding that Innoscience’s current products do not infringe Infineon’s patents while issuing a limited exclusion order covering only discontinued legacy devices.
In a case marking OpenAI’s first significant patent lawsuit in Europe, the UPC Court of Appeal overturned the Paris Local Division and held that the UPC has no jurisdiction to adjudicate patent infringement in non-UPC contracting states like the UK, Switzerland, and Spain.
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.
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.
The U.S. International Trade Commission issues exclusion and cease-and-desist orders against Innoscience for infringing Infineon’s gallium nitride power semiconductor patent, blocking imports of the Chinese chipmaker’s GaN products into the United States.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed that a golf-cart seller’s “TROJAN-EV” mark infringed Trojan Battery’s famous TROJAN trademark and upheld $4.7 million in disgorgement, but vacated a permanent injunction as overbroad for covering products outside the golf industry.
The ITC issued a limited exclusion order and cease and desist orders against Chinese chipmaker Innoscience, finding its GaN semiconductor devices infringe Infineon’s U.S. Patent No. 9,899,481 covering lateral transistor source-sensing designs.
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.
The ITC’s Full Commission affirmed that Innoscience infringed Infineon’s GaN transistor patent but found that Innoscience’s current redesigned products do not infringe, leaving the import ban with no practical effect on ongoing U.S. sales.
The Tenth Circuit reversed dismissal of trademark infringement claims, finding a management contract ambiguous on whether a charter school network could use permutations of licensed school names after terminating its management relationship.
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.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Igloo, holding that ‘first to market’ advertising claims about a biodegradable cooler concern the origin of an idea — not an observable product characteristic — and therefore fall outside the Lanham Act’s false advertising protections.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a district court’s finding that a patent infringement case was ‘exceptional’ under 35 U.S.C. § 285, upholding an attorney fee award where the plaintiff never pursued discovery or demonstrated any evidence of infringement.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s decision not to consider a new prior art reference raised for the first time in the petitioner’s reply brief, leaving one claim of a networked-gaming patent standing.
The Canadian Federal Court of Appeal upheld the invalidation of THERME-formative trademark registrations, holding that marks comprising English words may be refused if descriptive when pronounced in French.
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.
The Fourth Circuit held that PTAB draft opinions and inter-judge communications are protected from FOIA disclosure under the deliberative process privilege, and that circulation of drafts to non-panel judges is lawful deliberation, not ex parte misconduct.
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 Eleventh Circuit vacated summary judgment against Trunk Archive, holding that a photographer’s retention of narrow collaboration rights does not negate the exclusivity of a licensing agency’s rights under the Copyright Act.
The Ninth Circuit upheld an injunction barring a venture lender from interfering with Google’s royalty-free license to manufacture specialized computer chips, affirming that Google’s licensing rights survived the shutdown of its startup partner CNEX Labs.
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.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that a patent for automatically silencing a mobile phone when it pairs with a vehicle is directed to the abstract idea of screening notifications and lacks an inventive concept under Alice.
The UPC Central Division in Milan revoked the Academy of Military Medical Sciences’ European patent on the use of remdesivir to treat COVID-19, finding the claimed invention lacked inventive step because prior art published just ten days before the priority date already identified remdesivir as likely effective against the newly emerged Wuhan coronavirus.
The Delhi High Court granted an interim injunction restraining EaseMyBiz Technologies from launching its app or website, finding the name deceptively similar to MakeMyTrip’s established “MyBiz” corporate travel brand.
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.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that Enviro Tech’s poultry-processing patent was invalid because the term “about” in its pH range limitations failed to inform skilled artisans of the claim scope with reasonable certainty.
Japan’s IP High Court voided a trademark registration for “AI Announcer,” ruling the term is merely descriptive of AI-powered automated news-reading software and cannot be monopolized.
USPTO Director John Squires ordered the PTAB’s Delegated Rehearing Panel to review a decision invalidating a web-design patent, finding the Board gave ‘no explanation’ for diverging from a $170 million jury verdict that upheld the same patent on substantially similar evidence.
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.
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.
The UK Patents Court set a $392 million lump-sum FRAND balancing payment for a global SEP cross-license between Samsung and ZTE, largely discounting prior ZTE licenses negotiated under the shadow of U.S. sanctions as non-FRAND comparables.
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 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 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.
The Court of Justice of the European Union ruled that a retirement home’s retransmission of satellite television and radio broadcasts to residents’ rooms via internal cable does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, distinguishing permanent care home residents from transient hotel guests.
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.
In a remarkable reversal of its own prior reversal, the Tenth Circuit unanimously held that Netflix’s use of a 66-second funeral clip in the Tiger King docuseries was fair use, finding all four statutory factors favor the defendants.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the PTAB’s finding that Wildseed Mobile’s targeted mobile advertising patent claims are unpatentable as obvious, rejecting the patent owner’s narrow construction of ‘information taken from a message.’
The CJEU held that a retirement home’s retransmission of satellite TV and radio signals to residents’ rooms via internal cable does not constitute a ‘communication to the public’ under EU copyright law, because residents are not a ‘new public’ beyond the original broadcast audience.
In a precedential decision, the TTAB cancelled Everwise Credit Union’s trademark registration after finding the credit union filed its statement of use before actually using the mark in commerce, while still operating under its former Teachers Credit Union brand.