Posts in Copyright Litigation

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday denied certiorari in Frederick L. Allen, et al. v. Joshua Stein, Governor of North Carolina, a decade-plus long case that led to a Supreme Court decision as well as the introduction and subsequent repeal of a law to shield North Carolina from copyright liability. In January 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued the most recent ruling in the case, which related to Frederick (“Rick) Allen’s copyright battle against the State of North Carolina over documentary footage of a state-sponsored salvage project exhuming a shipwreck associated with the famed pirate, Blackbeard. Videographer Frederick Allen and his company Nautilus Productions recorded footage of a private company’s project to salvage Blackbeard’s flagship Queen Anne’s Revenge from the North Carolina coastline.

An Ohio judge has ruled that Amazon must face trial on claims that its Merch on Demand service directly and vicariously infringed an apparel company’s copyrights, although the company’s contributory-infringement claim was dismissed. In an October 14 opinion, U.S. District Judge Douglas R. Cole of the Southern District of Ohio denied Amazon and plaintiff Weekend Warrior Clothing LLC—a T-shirt company founded by two brothers—summary judgment on most of their competing claims.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling under seal affirming the District of Delaware’s grant of partial summary judgment to Canadian technology company Thomson Reuters on its claims that legal artificial intelligence (AI) company ROSS Intelligence infringed upon more than 2,000 copyrighted headnote summaries of U.S. case law from its Westlaw legal research platform.

Online counterfeiting has become ubiquitous. A seller located anywhere in the world can create a digital storefront, copy a brand owner’s photographs and product descriptions, adopt a business name that reveals nothing, and begin selling into the United States before the brand owner even knows the account exists. If the seller is discovered and enforcement begins, the listing disappears, the money moves out of the country and beyond the practical reach of the court system, and a new account surfaces under a different name. Then the entire process repeats.

A songwriter told the U.S. Supreme Court this week to reject an attempt by the four largest music companies in the world to reverse a Fifth Circuit ruling granting him all rights to the 1966 Swingin’ Medallions single, “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion in January 2026 in Vetter v. Resnick, affirming the Middle District of Louisiana’s grant of summary judgment declaring that Cyril Vetter, co-author of “Double Shot,” and Vetter’s affiliated companies are the sole owners of the copyright to the song throughout the world.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today in TexasLDPC Inc. v. Broadcom Inc., reversing a district court’s dismissal of a patent and copyright infringement lawsuit brought by an exclusive licensee that had not joined the patent owner as a co-plaintiff. The court held that TexasLDPC Inc.’s license agreement with Texas A&M University (A&M) did not automatically terminate when TexasLDPC shifted its business to patent enforcement. The agreement conveyed “all substantial rights” in the asserted patents to TexasLDPC, making A&M “not otherwise a necessary party” under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19.

On September 1, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) filed a Statement of Interest urging the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to hold that using copyrighted written works to train large language models (LLMs) is fair use, arguing that a contrary result would distort copyright law, suppress innovation and weaken U.S. competitiveness and national security. The statement was filed in reference to the multidistrict copyright litigation against OpenAI, although it specifically addressed claims by The New York Times and said its reasoning also applies to the related cases involving book authors and publishers.

On August 21, wikiHow, Inc. filed a complaint in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against OpenAI, Inc. and eight affiliated entities, alleging violations of the Copyright Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The lawsuit centers on claims that OpenAI copied wikiHow’s how-to articles without authorization to train ChatGPT and to ground its outputs, then used that copied content to generate substitutes for wikiHow’s website.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued a ruling answering multiple questions of first impression regarding copyright claims involving building plans, including the scope of protection under the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) for constructed buildings and floorplan renderings. Vacating the Western District of Texas’ dismissal of Kipp Flores Architects’ (KFA) copyright infringement claims, the Fifth Circuit affirmed the lower court’s dismissal of KFA’s claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) over alleged failures to include copyright management information (CMI) on new floorplans developed from KFA’s technical drawings.

As an expert witness on intellectual property litigations, I have noticed over the past few years parties with poor arguments in software copyright and software trade secret cases, both plaintiffs and defendants, have been taking advantage of technologically outdated protective orders to gain an unfair advantage. The U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where probably the majority of software IP cases take place, has a Model Protective Order for Litigation Involving Patents, Highly Sensitive Confidential Information and/or Trade Secrets that has become a de facto standard for software IP cases around the country. It is antiquated and needs to be updated.

In a precedential decision authored by Judge Hughes on Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) vacated-in-part and remanded a decision of the Court of Federal Claims that had awarded 4DD Holdings, LLC, and T4 Data Group, LLC $12,683,065.86 for the U.S. government’s infringement of their copyrighted software TETRA®. 4DD sued the Department of Defense (DOD) and the Department of Veterans Affairs (DVA) for infringement of its copyrighted software, TETRA, which served as an interoperability solution for military healthcare records stored by the two agencies in separate databases (dubbed the “Defense Medical Information Exchange (DMIX) program).

Stock photos. Blog thumbnails. Social media posts. Hero images. The image that makes a website look finished is often the same image that triggers a copyright demand letter. The facts usually are ordinary, not dramatic. A business hires a web designer or marketing contractor. The contractor pulls an image from someplace online, uses it on a site or post, and disappears. Months later, the owner receives a letter attaching a Visual Arts, or VA, registration and threatening statutory damages.

It’s easy to take for granted that books, news, films, shows, songs, video games, photographs, artwork, and more are ubiquitously available through apps, streams, downloads and other digital means. But the thriving legitimate digital marketplace we enjoy today didn’t emerge by accident. It was built, in significant part, on the historical bedrock of secondary liability—the well-established common-law legal principle that one who assists another in committing a wrong is just as liable as the direct wrongdoer. In the internet ecosystem, that means platforms, internet service providers (ISPs), and other online intermediaries bear some responsibility when they knowingly facilitate or profit from copyright infringement.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday denied motions to dismiss three copyright infringement lawsuits brought by a jury consultant, Lindsay Olson, against criminal defense attorneys representing defendants charged in the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, who downloaded her copyrighted report from a public docket and republished it in their own clients’ cases.