Posts in Litigation

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.

A panel on day three of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 offered the IP community a candid look at how large operating companies actually evaluate and respond to patent assertions. The answers carry direct implications for every practitioner advising clients on the sell side of a transaction. The session, titled The Big Tech View on Patents and the Patent Market, featured Russell Binns (Allied Security Trust (AST)), Ola Adekunle (Google), Caroline Pinkston (Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)), and Dean Geibel (Samtec).

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday reversed a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, ruling that internet service provider Cox Communications, Inc., is not contributorily liable for its subscribers’ copyright infringement. In a 7-2 decision authored by Justice Thomas, the Court held that a service provider is contributorily liable for a user’s infringement only when it intended for its service to be used in that way, which is established only if the provider either encouraged the infringement or designed the service specifically to facilitate it.

Nearly every operating company valued at greater than $20 billion in market capitalization is likely to be accused of patent infringement at some point. The high likelihood of utilizing another person or company’s patented technology led to an explosion of patent litigation activity over the last 30 years. Often, inventions emerge without a specific product in mind, and the strategy for the invention-turned-patent lacks a clear vision. This has been the way of invention since the patent offices were first formed and legal IP protection became a constitutionally ordained government program.

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday granted the Solicitor General’s motion for leave to participate in oral argument as amicus curiae and for divided argument in Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc. v. Amarin Pharma, Inc., a case concerning induced patent infringement in the pharmaceutical skinny label context. The order followed the filing of a merits response brief by Amarin on March 20, defending the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) decision that found Amarin plausibly alleged that Hikma Pharmaceuticals actively induced infringement of patents covering uses of Amarin’s cardiovascular drug Vascepa.

A panel on day one of IPWatchdog LIVE 2026 didn’t mince words: the voluntary patent licensing ecosystem is functionally broken, and the IP community needs to understand why. That was the diagnostic consensus from the panel titled Patent Dealmaking, Monetization & Licensing: An Examination of Capital, Risk, and Deal Flow, moderated by Brian O’Shaughnessy (Dinsmore & Shohl) and featuring Michael Gulliford (Soryn IP Capital), Louis Carbonneau (Tangible IP), and Dan Kesack (WTW Insurance).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision on Friday in Apple Inc. v. International Trade Commission, affirming a final determination that Apple violated Section 337 of the Tariff Act of 1930. The CAFC determined that the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) correctly concluded that Masimo Corporation and Cercacor Laboratories, Inc., proved that Apple violated Section 337 through the sale and import of certain Apple Watch models, ultimately “finding no error in the Commission’s domestic industry determination, its validity rulings, or its infringement findings.” The CAFC also held that the asserted patents were not unenforceable due to prosecution laches.

In 2008, a medical device company I represented, Datascope Corporation, won a hard-fought victory at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. That court reversed a verdict of patent infringement rendered by a federal jury in Baltimore in a suit brought by Johns Hopkins University and its licensee against my client. Johns Hopkins Univ. v. Datascope Corp., 543 F.3d 1342 (Fed. Cir. 2008).

The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware on Tuesday denied a motion for summary judgment in Cinemavault, Inc. v. Gameshow Network, LLC, allowing a trademark infringement and unfair competition lawsuit to proceed to trial. Judge Joel H. Slomsky rejected Gameshow Network, LLC’s arguments that Cinemavault, Inc. failed to continuously use its trademark, that Cinemavault, Inc. was judicially estopped from bringing a likelihood of confusion claim, and that the relevant Lapp factors precluded Cinemavault from establishing a likelihood of confusion between the two marks at issue.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a decision in Applications in Internet Time, LLC v. Salesforce, Inc., affirming a district court’s dismissal of AIT’s patent infringement suit against Salesforce for lack of constitutional standing. The court determined that the district court correctly concluded that Applications in Internet Time, LLC (AIT) had no exclusionary patent rights at the inception of the lawsuit. It also held that the district court did not abuse its discretion in denying equitable relief to cure the constitutional standing defect.