Posts in Courts

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a precedential decision in ironSource Ltd. v. Digital Turbine, Inc. dismissing Israeli software developer ironSource’s appeal of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) decision to grant mobile app tech developer Digital Turbine’s revised motion to amend patent claims challenged by ironSource in post-grant review (PGR) proceedings. The opinion, authored by Chief Judge Moore, determined that ironSource lacked Article III standing to pursue its appeal because it failed to establish an injury in fact based on Digital Turbine’s veiled threats that its patent claims covered aspects of discontinued ironSource products.

While artificial intelligence (AI) companies have long maintained that copyright law poses a significant barrier to innovation, it’s getting harder for them to make that argument with a straight face. It was one thing to claim that early text-based chatbots were magical boxes that didn’t really depend on the copyrighted works used to train them—a pretense that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny. But it’s quite another to make such claims when their systems are spitting out nearly perfect audiovisual renditions of Disney’s copyrighted characters, including Buzz Lightyear from Toy Story, Darth Vader from Star Wars, and Elsa from Frozen. That’s what Midjourney was doing when Disney sued it for infringement, and it’s also what OpenAI was doing when it struck a licensing deal with Disney.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Dometic Corp. v. International Trade Commission, affirming a final determination that Citimarine, L.L.C., and other intervenors did not violate Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. The CAFC determined that the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) correctly concluded that Dometic Corp. and Dometic Sweden AB failed to prove a violation through the import of certain marine air conditioning systems. The court affirmed the ITC finding that several claims of the asserted patent are invalid for anticipation and that the accused products do not infringe the remaining claims.

The U.S. Supreme Court today granted certiorari to a petition brought by internet service provider (ISP) Grande Communications Networks LLC, appealing from a U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit decision that upheld a jury verdict holding Grande Communications liable for contributory infringement against a group of major U.S. record labels. The Supreme Court granted certiorari and then vacated the judgment and remanded the case to the Fifth Circuit for reconsideration under the Court’s recent opinion in Cox Communications, Inc. v. Sony Music Entertainment.

Two recent federal district court decisions highlight the significant risks of sharing confidential information with a generative AI platform. In Trinidad v. OpenAI, the court dismissed the plaintiff’s trade secret claims under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) because the plaintiff had voluntarily disclosed her allegedly proprietary frameworks to OpenAI while using ChatGPT to create them.Then, Judge Rakoff in United States v. Heppner held that documents created using publicly available generative AI are not protected by the attorney-client privilege—in part because communications memorialized through an AI platform are not confidential when the platform is not contractually bound to keep them secret.

In a case of first impression, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), with Judge Lourie writing, issued a precedential decision today affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment holding two patents invalid for omitting a coinventor. Fortress Iron LP owns U.S. Patents 9,790,707 (“the ’707 patent”) and 10,883,290, which are both titled “Vertical Cable Rail Barrier.” The final designs for the inventions covered by the two patents were conceived by two Fortress employees and two employees of Fortress’ quality control liaison, Quan Zhou Yoddex Building Material Co., Ltd (YD).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Centripetal Networks, LLC v. Keysight Technologies, Inc., affirming a final written decision of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) and holding that the Board correctly construed a limitation of one independent claim of Centripetal’s patent and properly found that a prior art reference anticipated the claim.

On Sunday, March 29, National Public Radio’s (NPR) popular news broadcast All Things Considered featured a segment on Federal Circuit Judge Pauline Newman’s efforts to challenge her current suspension based upon Chief Judge Kimberly Moore’s allegations that Judge Newman is mentally unfit to continue serving on the Federal Circuit. The news segment follows a week of developments, including a ruling by the Judicial Conference of the United States’ (JCUS) Committee on Judicial Conduct and Disability dismissing Judge Newman’s statutory and constitutional challenges to the Federal Circuit’s renewed suspension of new case assignments.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Tesla, Inc. v. Charge Fusion Technologies, LLC, affirming in part, reversing in part, and vacating in part a final written decision of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The CAFC determined that the PTAB improperly construed a limitation of one independent claim but correctly construed limitations of other independent claims. The court reversed the finding of non-obviousness for claim 1, vacated the judgment regarding its dependent claims, and affirmed the finding of non-obviousness for the remaining claims.

In a win for TikTok, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today affirmed a district court’s grant of a Rule 12(c) motion holding 10Tales, Inc.’s targeted content patent claims invalid as ineligible under Section 101. The opinion was authored by Judge Reyna. 10Tales sued TikTok and ByteDance in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, alleging infringement of its U.S. Patent No. 8,856,030, which generally covers “a system for customizing or personalizing content based on user social network information.”

At IPWatchdog LIVE 2026, a panel on IP litigation strategy returned to a point experienced litigators know well: most IP cases are not won at trial. Instead, the decisive work often occurs much earlier, through pre-suit diligence, early motion practice, discovery strategy, and expert challenges that shape whether a case survives long enough to reach a jury.

On remand from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC), the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) on Thursday reaffirmed its decision that The Broad Institute, Inc., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and President and Fellows of Harvard College (“Broad”) were the first inventors of the use of CRISPR-Cas9 gene editing in eukaryotic cells.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential decision in Ascendis Pharma A/S v. BioMarin Pharmaceutical Inc., affirming a district court order that upheld the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California decision denying Ascendis’s motion for a mandatory stay under 28 U.S.C. § 1659(a)(2). The ruling concluded that Ascendis was not entitled to a mandatory stay because Ascendis voluntarily dismissed its original complaint and filed a virtually identical refiled complaint to restart the statutory deadline. Judge Stoll authored the opinion, joined by Judges Lourie and Chen.

The U.S. government filed its brief in opposition yesterday to Janssen Pharmaceuticals and Bristol Myers Squibb Company’s (BMS) petition for writ of certiorari challenging the government’s Medicare Drug Price Negotiation Program. A split U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit decision  in September 2025 affirmed a grant of summary judgment to the government that the imposition of the Program via the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) does not violate the companies’ constitutional rights.