Posts in Guest Contributors

Companies face substantial liability for trade secret misappropriation. Jury awards this year have reached staggering amounts…. On November 21, 2024, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in Computer Sciences Corp. v. Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., __ 5th Cir. __, 2025 WL 3249148 (5th Cir. 2025), affirmed $56 million in compensatory damages, $112 million in punitive damages, a permanent injunction, and a 10-year monitorship against TCS… The Computer Sciences decision provides critical guidance on trade secret handling under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA), clarifies what constitutes “willful and malicious” misappropriation, and establishes that exemplary damages may be awarded even where the plaintiff suffers no harm beyond lost profits.

As AI adoption accelerates, it is crucial that companies act proactively to develop risk, compliance, and ethical frameworks to ensure sustainable innovation and responsible IP use. On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters, Allison Gaul, a registered patent attorney who evaluates digital products with an eye toward intellectual property strategy, value creation, and legal risk, discusses the aggressive landscape of data acquisition by various AI entities.

What’s really holding America back in the biopharma race against China isn’t just Beijing’s subsidies or cheaper labor. It’s the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s self-inflicted wound: a court so panel-dependent that no one—brand or generic—knows which rule will apply until the panel is drawn. The Supreme Court can fix this in one stroke by granting certiorari in MSN Pharmaceuticals v. Novartis (No. 25-225) and killing the bizarre “after-arising technology” exception that lets old, vague patents swallow future inventions.

In the latest episode of IP Innovators, host Steve Brachmann speaks with Aaron Capron, partner and head of the Patent Office Practice at Finnegan, about how patent prosecution is evolving across AI, quantum computing, semiconductors, and other rapidly developing fields. Throughout the discussion, Capron consistently returns to themes that resonate deeply with experienced patent practitioners: the importance of thinking like an examiner, the need for robust infrastructure to manage complex portfolios, and the reality that legal technology—especially AI—requires thoughtful integration, not simple adoption.

The most contested element in establishing a prima facie Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) trade secret misappropriation claim is whether the owner undertook “reasonable efforts” to maintain secrecy. Defendants routinely cite a lack of or poorly implemented security measures as a defense. On November 18, 2025, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Samuel Sherbrooke Corporate Ltd. v. Mayer offered guidance on what constitutes such measures at the pleading stage, reversing the district court’s dismissal on the ground that the plaintiff failed to take reasonable measures to protect the trade secrets at issue.

Something important happened at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) last month, and it did not get nearly the attention it deserved. The Office rolled out its Artificial Intelligence Search Automated Pilot (ASAP) Program, and for the first time, AI is now part of the pre-examination process, rather than operating around it. Given where things stand, this move almost feels inevitable. Filings keep climbing, examiners are stretched thin, and first office action pendency  reached an all-time high of 22.6 months in FY 2025. Anyone who has spent time in prosecution knows the system needs help. AI can absolutely make the early search phase faster and more consistent.

Every November, we gather around tables filled with the fruits of hard work and gratitude. It’s a season that reminds us to pause and appreciate not only what we’ve built, but also the unseen effort and foresight that made it possible. In innovation, that same kind of gratitude is found in something often overlooked but profoundly important: Freedom to Operate (FTO). Most founders understand the excitement of being patent pending. But few truly grasp what it means to be free to operate. The two are not the same.

The practice of music sampling, which is the integration of pre-recorded sounds into new musical gestures, experienced a golden, unregulated age in the late 1980s that is almost unimaginable today. Major works like Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988) and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (1989) layered dozens of samples on a single track, while massive commercial hits like Tone-L?c’s “Wild Thing” (1988) openly lifted core musical elements.

I would like to thank U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires for his initiative to stop serial patent challenges at the USPTO. It is a disgrace that the USPTO and our laws allow such blatant harassment and abuse of process. Squires’ vision is absolutely correct that a patent challenger should have a SINGLE opportunity to challenge a patent in a SINGLE proceeding in a SINGLE venue (a court or the USPTO/Patent Trial and Appeal Board [PTAB], but not both).

In a globalized economy, it’s essential to understand that patents are still nationalized documents. For example, a U.S. patent only grants the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, and importing the claimed invention within the United States. It has no bearing on activities in Europe, Canada, Mexico, China, or anywhere else in the world. To restrict activities there, you will typically need a patent granted in each relevant country. This can boil down to filing and prosecution on a per-country basis. However, those seeking protection in Europe do have some additional options for a single application granting protection in multiple nations!

Practitioners in the high-stakes world of the International Trade Commission (ITC) are familiar with the formidable power of a Section 337 remedial order. The threat of a cease-and-desist order, backed by civil penalties of up to $100,000 a day or twice the value of imported goods, is a powerful deterrent. For years, the process for enforcing these penalties has been a settled feature of ITC practice. But a recent Supreme Court decision, Jarkesy v. SEC, has introduced a new constitutional question that ITC litigators might want to watch out for.

Artificial intelligence (AI), viewed from an optimist’s perspective, is an accelerant for humans; a tool to handle tedious tasks that allow users to spend more time and energy on what really matters. On the current episode of Understanding IP Matters (UIPM), Eric Bear, a classically-trained actor, singer and dancer, and now a kinesthetic artist specializing in primate motion capture, discusses the interplay of creativity and technology. Bear is a successful entrepreneur, industry expert and inventor responsible for more than 100 patents.

For the past five years, I have taught Legislation & Regulation at Oklahoma City University School of Law—a course at the crossroads of administrative law, statutory interpretation, and the legislative process. Each semester, my students and I return to a central inquiry: when, if ever, should courts defer to agency interpretations, and when must judges exercise their own independent judgment? That question has taken on new urgency in the wake of the Supreme Court’s recent restructuring of administrative law.

In 1980, the Supreme Court decided Diamond v. Chakrabarty, the seminal Section 101 case holding that non-natural, man-made organisms are patent eligible. The Court’s decision paved the way for substantial investment in the then-nascent biotech industry. Forty-five years later, one would think that there’s little room to debate the patent eligibility of genetically engineered host cells—particularly a host cell that can produce non-native viral plasmids and proteins useful in making life-saving, gene-based medicines. But that debate is front and center in Regenxbio v. Sarepta, a pending appeal at the Federal Circuit that follows more recent Supreme Court and Federal Circuit decisions that have turned Section 101 into a short-cut for bringing patent challenges under Sections 102, 103, and 112.

Welcome to the very first installment of Cool AI Patents of the Month. Each month, we’ll look at some of the more eye-catching and creative ways Artificial Intelligence (AI) is showing up in innovations that themselves wind up represented in patents or patent applications. The goal isn’t to get overly technical, but to highlight technology that’s genuinely cool and thought-provoking — the kind of inventions that make you say, “Wow, that’s clever.”