Posts in Litigation

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday affirmed a district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement in favor of Tricam Industries, Inc. in a patent infringement suit brought by Little Giant Ladder Systems, LLC. The decision held that Tricam’s ladders did not infringe Little Giant’s patent, either literally or under the doctrine of equivalents, and that the district court correctly construed the key claim term “cavity.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Wednesday affirmed a district court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of AeroVironment, Inc. in a patent infringement suit brought by inventors Paul and David Arlton. The decision held that AeroVironment’s affirmative defense under 28 U.S.C. § 1498 covered all of its alleged infringing activities related to the Ingenuity Mars helicopter. AeroVironment cross-appealed the district court’s denial of its motion for attorneys’ fees.

On February 2, 2026, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Joshua D. Wolson, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, made several key summary judgment rulings in advance of trial in Arbutus Biopharma Corporation and Genevant Sciences GmbH (collectively “Arbutus”) v. Moderna, Inc. and ModernaTx, Inc.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday affirmed two final written decisions from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings, concluding that the board did not err in finding claims of two Eagle View Technologies, Inc. patents unpatentable as obvious. Eagle View Technologies, Inc. had appealed the PTAB’s decisions, which held that claims of its U.S. Patent Nos. 8,670,961 and 8,078,436 were obvious over a combination of prior art references. The patents, both titled “Aerial Roof Estimation Systems and Methods,” share a common specification and relate to systems and methods that allow estimates involving roofs on buildings to be created remotely. The patents teach remotely generating a roof estimate report by analyzing multiple aerial images of a building to determine the area, shape, and slope of the roof.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Monday issued a precedential decision affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment of non-infringement to Armaid Company, Inc. that its massage product did not infringe Range of Motion Products LLC’s (RoM’s) design patent claims. The opinion was authored by Judge Cunningham and Chief Judge Moore delivered a dissent in which she claimed her court has caused “the legal frame of reference” in design patent law cases to become “askew.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday issued a precedential decision affirming a district court decision that Sound View Innovations’ multimedia streaming patent claims were not infringed because Hulu’s “accused products do not perform the claim limitations in the required sequence.” The decision was authored by Judge Chen.

Concord Music Group, Inc., Universal Music Group, and ABKCO Music, Inc. filed a complaint on Wednesday for copyright and Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) violations against Anthropic PBC, Dario Amodei, and Benjamin Mann in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, adding another lawsuit against generative artificial intelligence companies. The publishers alleged that Anthropic engaged in mass piracy by downloading millions of unauthorized copies of books containing their copyrighted musical compositions from notorious pirate library websites, including Library Genesis (LibGen) and Pirate Library Mirror (PiLiMi). The complaint argued that Anthropic used BitTorrent to acquire these works and subsequently trained its Claude AI models on the stolen content, thereby directly infringing the publishers’ exclusive rights and undermining the music licensing market.

Whether the plaintiff has adequately identified the trade secrets that have allegedly been misappropriated is a commonly litigated and critical issue under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA). Unlike other types of intellectual property—such as patents, copyrights, and trademarks—where the property has already been identified and registered, trade secrets by definition are secret and cannot be identified publicly without destroying the subject matter of the plaintiff’s legal claim. Yet defendants still need to know what secrets they have allegedly misappropriated, and the court needs to know what the case is about.

On January 23, the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) urged the U.S. Supreme Court to reject a petition from Stephen Thaler, who seeks copyright protection for a work created by his artificial intelligence (AI) system. The DOJ argued that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit correctly upheld the United States Copyright Office’s refusal to register a copyright for an image that was admittedly created without human authorship.

In 2014, the Supreme Court held that an invention is patent-ineligible if directed to “abstract ideas,” but that there was no need to define the term. Alice Corp. Pty. Ltd. v CLS Bank Int’l, 573 U.S. 208, 221. Now, with the experience of more than a decade of confusing and unpredictable decision-making by lower courts trying to apply Alice, it is time for the Supreme Court to step in and provide a definition and workable test for the abstract-ideas exclusion…. The Court should grant the petition for certiorari filed by United States Automobile Association (USAA) in USAA v. PNC Bank on January 14, 2026. That will allow the Supreme Court to address the most basic of questions: What is an abstract idea?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) has denied another petition for writ of mandamus seeking to challenge the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) so-called settled expectations doctrine, which was introduced by then-Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart. In the present case, Google sought mandamus relief after the USPTO denied its petitions for inter partes review (IPR) of VirtaMove Corp.’s U.S. Patent No. 7,519,814 patent because “the patent[] ha[s] been in force for more than 14 years, creating strong settled expectations.”

A recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit ruling upholding the federal Inflation Reduction Act (IRA)’s drug price negotiation program has been appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, one of many challenges to the Act’s constitutionality. The IRA requires drugmakers to sell selected patented drugs to the government for its Medicare Parts B & D programs at a stipulated “maximum fair price”. If they don’t agree to these prices, then they face tax penalties on sales of the drug exceeding their profits from it, or the exclusion of all their drugs from Medicare and Medicaid purchases. This would foreclose access to up to 160 million patients, accounting for around 40% of US prescription drug spending or 20% of global prescription drug spending. US government purchases are valued at $200 billion annually.

On Friday, January 23, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit issued a ruling in Allen v. Stein that likely ends a decade-long copyright battle over documentary footage of a state-sponsored salvage project exhuming a shipwreck associated with the famed pirate Blackbeard. Reversing and vacating rulings by the Eastern District of North Carolina, the Fourth Circuit found that an erroneous legal standard was used in allowing Allen to pursue a new theory for his copyright claims, remanding the case to the district court with directions to dismiss Allen’s complaint with prejudice.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday vacated and remanded a final written decision from the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in an inter partes review (IPR) proceeding. The court concluded that the Board erred by requiring petitioner Guardant Health, Inc. to show a motivation to combine steps that were already disclosed in sequence in a single prior art reference.