Posts in Litigation

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit issued a ruling under seal affirming the District of Delaware’s grant of partial summary judgment to Canadian technology company Thomson Reuters on its claims that legal artificial intelligence (AI) company ROSS Intelligence infringed upon more than 2,000 copyrighted headnote summaries of U.S. case law from its Westlaw legal research platform.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued a minute order on September 18, in Perlmutter v. Blanche, staying the lawsuit brought by Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter until December 18, 2026. Judge Timothy J. Kelly pointed to the House of Representatives’ June passage of the Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act, H.R. 6028, which would designate the Register of Copyrights as an officer “appointed by the President” with the advice and consent of the Senate.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Berkeley*IEOR v. W.W. Grainger Inc., reversing a district court’s grant of summary judgment that a set of profitability-calculation patent claims were eligible under Section 101. The CAFC held that the representative claim is directed to an abstract idea and that the inventive concept identified by the district court, a form of parallel computer processing, is not required by the claim language.

Following a July petition for writ of certiorari filed by Kahoot AS! asking the U.S. Supreme Court to consider whether the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) “settled expectations” doctrine for denying inter partes review (IPR) requests is authorized under the patent statute, the PTAB Bar Association and other amici this past week have urged the Court to take up…

Online counterfeiting has become ubiquitous. A seller located anywhere in the world can create a digital storefront, copy a brand owner’s photographs and product descriptions, adopt a business name that reveals nothing, and begin selling into the United States before the brand owner even knows the account exists. If the seller is discovered and enforcement begins, the listing disappears, the money moves out of the country and beyond the practical reach of the court system, and a new account surfaces under a different name. Then the entire process repeats.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in In re Incept LLC, vacating and remanding a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that had affirmed an examiner’s rejection of a medical catheter patent application as obvious. Since the Board’s obviousness analysis relied on an incorrect construction of the claim term “flow barrier,” the CAFC declined to reach the underlying obviousness question and returned the case to the Board for further proceedings.

A songwriter told the U.S. Supreme Court this week to reject an attempt by the four largest music companies in the world to reverse a Fifth Circuit ruling granting him all rights to the 1966 Swingin’ Medallions single, “Double Shot (Of My Baby’s Love).” The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit issued an opinion in January 2026 in Vetter v. Resnick, affirming the Middle District of Louisiana’s grant of summary judgment declaring that Cyril Vetter, co-author of “Double Shot,” and Vetter’s affiliated companies are the sole owners of the copyright to the song throughout the world.

A coalition of 214 companies and organizations sent a letter on September 14 to Carolyn A. Dubay, Secretary of the Committee on Rules of Practice and Procedure at the Administrative Office of the United States Courts, urging the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules to amend the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (FRCP) to require disclosure of nonparty litigation funders in federal civil litigation. Signatories included Amazon, Google, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, Meta, Ford, Anthropic, OpenAI, numerous insurers, pharmaceutical firms, and manufacturers.

In a precedential decision issued Monday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) vacated a patent infringement judgment against Nine Energy Service Inc., holding that the Western District of Texas court incorrectly construed two terms of NCS Multistage’s patent and that an earlier sale relied upon by NCS did not qualify as a public disclosure under the America Invents Act (AIA).

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision today in TexasLDPC Inc. v. Broadcom Inc., reversing a district court’s dismissal of a patent and copyright infringement lawsuit brought by an exclusive licensee that had not joined the patent owner as a co-plaintiff. The court held that TexasLDPC Inc.’s license agreement with Texas A&M University (A&M) did not automatically terminate when TexasLDPC shifted its business to patent enforcement. The agreement conveyed “all substantial rights” in the asserted patents to TexasLDPC, making A&M “not otherwise a necessary party” under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 19.

On Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a ruling in AlterWAN, Inc. v. Amazon.com, Inc. affirming a stipulated final judgment of noninfringement entered by the District of Delaware and dismissing AlterWAN’s challenges to the district court’s construction of claims directed to wide area network (WAN) implementation. Dissenting to the majority opinion was U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian, sitting by designation from the Southern District of New York, who took issue with the majority’s judgment resting on non-claim terms inferred as limitations from vague specification language and irrelevant prosecution history.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a precedential decision Friday in Moskowitz Family LLC v. Globus Medical, Inc., affirming a district court’s grant of summary judgment of noninfringement, its construction of the claim term “universal,” and its denial of a motion for judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) of infringement.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in Guymon v. Squires, affirming a decision from the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia dismissing with prejudice an inventor’s lawsuit challenging a patent term adjustment (PTA) determination. Circuit Judge Hughes wrote for the court, joined by Chief Judge Moore and Circuit Judge Lourie, and rejected each of the three arguments that Guymon raised on appeal.

Congress and the courts have spent two decades treating patents as active weapons in an ongoing commercial fight. That framing misses what patents actually are to most of the people who own them: inheritable property. Twenty-year terms outlast careers. Portfolios pass to spouses, children, foundations, and trusts. Licensing income can support a family for a generation after the inventor stops working…. The pending fights over funder disclosure — Suggestion 26-CV-8 before the Advisory Committee on Civil Rules, the USITC’s proposed 19 C.F.R. § 210.14a, and S.3826, the Litigation Funding Transparency Act of 2026 — are not really arguments about transparency. They are arguments about whether a solo inventor’s family keeps what the inventor spent 30 years building.

To prevent innocent individuals from being held liable while acting in good faith, the patent statute requires that patent owners put would-be infringers on notice of their intellectual property rights before they are able to hold them liable for any acts of infringement. But what does a notice letter need for it to count? How granular must it be? Are claim charts required?