Posts in Technology & Innovation

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.

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.

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?

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.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday, January 22, issued a precedential decision affirming a district court ruling that granted Google’s motion to dismiss a patent owner’s infringement suit for failure to state a claim. The CAFC agreed with the district court that the software claims in question were directed to a patent-ineligible abstract idea. The opinion was authored by CAFC Chief Judge Moore and joined by Judges Hughes and Stoll.

On January 22, the Human Artistry Campaign, on behalf of a broad cross-section of the American creative community, launched a new advocacy campaign, titled “Stealing Isn’t Innovation.” The campaign’s core message is a direct protest against the “illegal mass harvesting of copyrighted works” by large technology companies to build and train their Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) platforms.

A group of conservative leaders on Wednesday sent a letter to the Director of the National Economic Council, Kevin Hassett, and Chief of Staff to President Trump, Susie Wiles, strongly supporting the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) issued in October, titled “Revision to Rules of Practice before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.” The NPRM modifies the rules of practice for inter partes reviews (IPRs) before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), with the stated goal being “to focus inter partes review proceedings on patent claims that have not previously been challenged in litigation or where prior litigation was resolved at an early stage.” The deadline for comments was December 2 and the Office has received 11,442 total submissions.

There are lots of familiar recommendations to make U.S. businesses more competitive globally. All are valid, but none are particularly creative or original. One solution that hasn’t been pursued is not only simple, a variation of it has been implemented by America’s largest and most aggressive economic competitor: remove the filing fees for inventors and intellectual property (IP)creators under 18.

On Tuesday afternoon, the U.S. House of Representatives Ways and Means Committee’s Subcommittee on Trade convened a hearing titled Maintaining American Innovation and Technology Leadership, which explored a host of regulatory and other legal burdens being placed on tech industry trade by foreign governments to the detriment of American innovators and consumers. Among the panel witnesses at the subcommittee hearing was former U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Andrei Iancu, who spoke to several ways that our nation’s adversaries and trading partners alike are weakening American IP rights and how those issues should be addressed by U.S. policymakers.

Sharing information about an invention is not an option. With patents, disclosure is a requirement which benefits the inventor, other inventors and society. When and how an invention is shared makes a huge difference. Disclosing information and sharing the right to practice it are not the same. The Patent Bay, a new patent platform from a Swedish company that believes some patent owners are hoarders, is looking to change how patents are shared and used.

In the most recent episode of IP Innovators, host Steve Brachmann sits down with Stephanie Curcio, CEO and co-founder of NLPatent, to unpack how AI is reshaping prosecution, search, and the overall workflow across patent professions. Curcio, who began her career in traditional patent drafting and prosecution, explains how early concept-based AI search tools convinced her the profession was on the verge of a seismic shift.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Tuesday affirmed a district court decision finding that Technology in Ariscale, LLC’s patent for a transmission signal decoding method was ineligible under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The opinion was authored by Judge Cunningham.

Much of the focus on generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has been on training data ingestion—the moment when AI “steals” from creators. But legally, that’s not where the real fight should be. Decades of legal precedent—from search engines to image?scanning to streaming media—already give us a roadmap. No new formulation of copyright law by Congress, as suggested by some academics, is necessary. By considering these seven unique aspects of GenAI systems, copyright analysis is actually easy.