Posts in Courts

Two weeks after the Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay an interlocutory injunction issued by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, in September that allowed Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter to return to her post pending her lawsuit against President Donald Trump for allegedly illegally removing her from office, Perlmutter has responded. In her opposition to the application for a stay, filed on Monday, Perlmutter accused the administration of making “an inexcusable mess of Congress’s plans for the governance of its Library.”

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a nonprecedential ruling in CPC Patent Technologies Pty Ltd. v. ASSA ABLOY AB reversing an obviousness determination by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) over a dissent by Circuit Judge Evan Wallach from the majority’s analysis of the PTAB’s factual findings on prior art disclosures. Although the reversal gives CPC Patent another opportunity to salvage patent claims to biometric card security systems, the CAFC also issued a Rule 36 summary affirmance affirming the invalidity of other claims from the patent-at-issue, while the U.S. Supreme Court denied cert to a CPC Patent petition challenging the CAFC’s Rule 36 practice in separate PTAB appeals.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted a motion from the U.S. Solicitor General to participate in oral argument as an amicus in the copyright case between Cox Communications and Sony Music Entertainment. The order allows the government to weigh in during the December 1 hearing on whether an internet service provider (ISP) can be held contributorily liable for copyright infringement committed by its users.

The Federal Circuit issued its long-awaited decision in Google LLC v. Sonos, Inc. on August 28, 2025,  providing guidance on the doctrine of prosecution laches. As the first U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit decision on prosecution laches for a patent issued after 1995—when patent terms changed from 17-years-from issuance to 20-years-from filing—some suspected the Federal Circuit might definitively end the prosecution laches doctrine. Although prosecution laches remains a valid equitable defense, the Federal Circuit placed significant limitations on its applicability.

In less than 2.5 years, the Unified Patent Court (UPC) has established itself as a hallmark for high-profile patent litigation. This venue is a reality that U.S. companies need to be aware of Why? U.S. companies are “at both sides of the v” before the UPC. Below are the 10 most important questions that define liability risks before the UPC, both from a defendant’s and a plaintiff’s perspective. These questions will be put into perspective and compared to U.S. district court and International Trade Commission (ITC) litigation.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has denied three mandamus petitions asking the court to step in and curb the recently-implemented practice by which the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director decides whether to institute inter partes review (IPR) proceedings. In the one precedential ruling in In Re Motorola Solutions, Inc., the CAFC—in an opinion authored by Judge Linn—rejected Motorola’s arguments that then-Acting USPTO Director Coke Morgan Stewart violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution by deinstituting eight IPR petitions it filed against claims of Stellar LLC’s patents.

Today, Mrs Justice Joanna Smith DBE of the United Kingdom’s High Court of Justice issued a highly awaited ruling in Getty Images (US) Inc. v. Stability AI Ltd., a case which was expected to have major implications in determining liability for generative artificial intelligence (AI) developers under UK intellectual property law. The 205-page decision, which mainly focuses on Getty’s trademark claim while also clarifying important aspects of secondary copyright liability in the AI context, failed to address certain fundamental questions in large part because Getty failed to raise sufficient evidence to proceed with its claim of primary copyright infringement at trial.

U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires issued a Director Review decision on Monday, which he designated as precedential, vacating a decision granting institution of an inter partes review (IPR) because the Board erred in accepting the petitioner’s inconsistent claim constructions without explanation. In Revvo Technologies, Inc. v. Cerebrum Sensor Technologies, Inc., the PTAB instituted the IPR on September 15, 2025, and Director Review was initiated sua sponte in order to address the claim construction issues.

On Friday, October 31, Professors Shlomit Yanisky-Ravid, Lawrence Lessig and a number of other professors and researchers filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court in support of Dr. Stephen Thaler’s petition for a writ of certiorari in Thaler v. Perlmutter, which is urging the Court to grant certiorari and recognize copyright protection for works generated by artificial intelligence (AI). The brief argued that “excluding AI-generated works from copyright protection threatens the foundations of American creativity, innovation, and economic growth,” warning that the lower court’s interpretation, which requires human authorship, disregards the “spirit of the Copyright Act.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision on Thursday, in part clarifying its precedent on the interpretation of “by others” or “by another” under pre-America Invents Act (AIA) 35 U.S.C. §§ 102(a), (e). The opinion was authored by Judge Linn. Merck Serono appealed two decisions of the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) holding claims of Merck’s U.S. Patent Nos. 7,713,947 and 8,377,903 unpatentable in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings brought by Hopewell Pharma Ventures. The Board found the claims unpatentable as obvious over a combination of two prior art references, “Bodor” and “Stelmasiak”.

A New York judge ruled on Monday that OpenAI cannot stop a consolidated, multi-district class action brought against by dozens of authors for direct copyright infringement by the outputs of its large language model (LLM), ChatGPT. OpenAI argued that the plaintiffs had failed to allege substantial similarity between the works and ChatGPT’s outputs, but Judge Sidney Stein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said  that “[a] more discerning observer could reasonably conclude that the allegedly infringing outputs are substantially similar to plaintiffs’ copyrighted works.”

Today, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential ruling in Aortic Innovations LLC v. Edwards Lifesciences Corp. affirming most of a non-infringement ruling entered by the District of Delaware over accused transcatheter heart valve products with balloon-expandable frames. Addressing challenges to the district court’s claim construction raised by Aortic, the Federal Circuit determined that the patentee acted as its own lexicographer for the claim term “outer frame” through consistent interchangeable uses of that term made in connection with specific embodiments disclosed in the specification.

Reddit filed a lawsuit yesterday against artificial intelligence (AI) company Perplexity AI and three other defendants for their alleged illegal circumvention of Reddit security measures meant to protect misuse of its content and data. Reddit, which describes itself in the complaint as “one of the largest repositories of human conversation in existence,” likened the actions of Oxylabs UAB, AWMProxy, and SerpApi to those of “would-be bank robbers.” Through their development of tools that bypass both Google’s and Reddit’s anti-scraping measures, and their scraping of Reddit content from Google search results, these defendants, “knowing they cannot get into the bank vault, break into the armored truck carrying the cash instead,” said the complaint.

On October 21, 10x Genomics, Inc. and Prognosys Biosciences, Inc. filed a complaint for patent infringement against Illumina, Inc. in the United States District Court for the District of Delaware, asserting that Illumina’s spatial technology products infringed on patents covering technology for spatial transcriptomics, which allows researchers to study gene activity within a cell’s tissue. U.S. Patent Nos. 11,008,607, 11,549,138, 12,234,505, and 12,297,487 are owned by Prognosys Biosciences and have significant applications in cancer research, neuroscience and immunology.