Posts in Government

The Council for Innovation Promotion (C4IP) issued a statement Tuesday expressing concern about a rule recently proposed by the U.S. Department of the Treasury to enact the Comprehensive Outbound Investment National Security (COINS) Act, which was itself enacted as part of the Fiscal Year 2026 National Defense Authorization Act.

For most of professional history, experience could not be separated from the professional who acquired it. Forms, manuals, and software captured portions of professional judgment, but the judgment itself remained human. That practical limitation preserved two distinctions the law depends on: the distinction between an employer’s property and an employee’s knowledge and skill, and the distinction between one client’s confidences and the next client’s matter. However, modern artificial intelligence (AI) removes this limitation.

The European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO) and the European Commission released a report today titled “EU Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights” on results at the EU border and in the EU internal market in 2025. The report explained that “over 196 million counterfeit articles were detained at the EU border and in the EU internal market, with an estimated retail value of EUR 6.3 billion.” Detention volume rose over 67% from 2024, and the estimated value surpassed 2024 by almost 63%, which the report identifies as the “second consecutive all-time record” for value.

Congress is considering a bill that would let patents on prescription drugs be rendered unenforceable over an honest paperwork error, even when the underlying invention is genuinely new, non-obvious, and valuable to patients. Supporters of the Medication Affordability and Patent Integrity Act (S. 2658), which the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee reported in July, say it will lower drug prices by closing what they describe as a loophole that drugmakers use to extend their monopolies.

Many intellectual property rights peacefully coexist because they apply to distinct aspects of a product. Issues can arise when intellectual property rights that expire and intellectual property rights that do not expire protect the same or overlapping features of the same product. One example is design patents and trade dress rights, both of which apply to non-functional ornamental features.

Artificial intelligence could help deliver the next generation of lifesaving medicines. It could also weaken the economic foundation that makes discovering those medicines possible. Both propositions deserve serious attention, and neither is mutually exclusive. Celebrating faster discovery tells only part of the story if the same technology allows competitors to appropriate the commercial opportunity created by pioneer research or obtain patent claims that obstruct the innovator’s next steps.

On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued an order list that included a denial of Google’s petition for writ of certiorari challenging the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) development of settled expectations doctrine at the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). This latest setback to industry-wide efforts opposing the duration of a patent’s life in force as a consideration leading to discretionary denials of inter partes review (IPR) proceedings comes a few weeks after the U.S. Solicitor General urged denial of Google’s cert petition, agreeing with the Federal Circuit that such a challenge was not available on mandamus review.

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.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today in Google LLC v. Valtrus Innovations Ltd., affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) final written decision that found Google did not demonstrate the unpatentability of claims 1 through 23 of a patent on merging search-result lists. The court rejected arguments that the Board relied on legally insufficient evidence to corroborate an inventor’s conception testimony and that substantial evidence did not support a finding of reasonably continuous diligence.

Last week, the Court of Justice for the European Union (CJEU) issued a pair of press releases conveying important clarifications to large platform designations under a pair of major legislative packages regulating e-commerce within the EU: the Digital Services Act (DSA) and the Digital Markets Act (DMA). In one ruling by the EU’s General Court, and another opinion issued by an Advocate General of the CJEU, large platform designations creating obligations under either of those acts have been upheld for both major social media platform TikTok and Stripchat, an online adult entertainment platform operated across the EU.

I have spent my career around artists: booking them, interviewing them, publishing their stories and watching how this business treats the people who make it run. Right now the most valuable thing many of those artists own is not a catalog. It is their voice. And in the United States, how well that voice is protected still depends on where you happen to be standing. That has to change. Congress should pass one federal voice-and-likeness right, and it should do it now.

Imagine a law which costs taxpayers nothing and creates no bureaucracy, all while providing critical incentives for turning billions of dollars of previously untapped government funded research into new products, companies and jobs which help drive American competitiveness. Imagine that this law is a recognized gold standard which our rivals are adopting. Now imagine that some voices are calling for us to abandon that model even though its documented impact has hit unprecedented levels.

On the eve of the one-year anniversary of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to revise the rules of practice for the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), the Innovation Alliance is urging the administration to finalize the proposal. The NPRM was published on October 16, 2025, with the aim of focusing inter partes review (IPR) proceedings “on patent claims that have not previously been challenged in litigation or where prior litigation was resolved at an early stage.”

Imagine building most of a great machine, and then filing a patent application on that machine because you want a return on the effort you spent building it. Years later, imagine filing a continuation-in-part (CIP) patent application after finishing the machine, and being told that in order to get the patent, you have to distinguish over your own initial disclosure. What a shame that this type of a statement has to be made to inventors. Patents are certainly needed to maintain competitive advantage, but one thing should not stand in the way of inventors who procure them—themselves.