Posts in Technology & Innovation

The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware on Tuesday granted in part and denied in part a motion for summary judgment in Arbutus Biopharma Corp. v. Moderna, Inc., narrowing the invalidity defenses that Moderna can assert at a jury trial. U.S. District Judge Joshua D. Wolson precluded Moderna from challenging several Arbutus patents on obviousness and derivation grounds but found that Moderna had raised a genuine factual dispute regarding enablement that must be resolved by a jury.

As the AI revolution accelerates and continues to reshape traditional business models, it has triggered a cascade of new legal, regulatory and policy challenges. At the forefront of these emerging issues are a growing number of high-stakes legal battles between content creators and major Generative AI (GenAI) companies behind large language models (LLMs). This article examines key legal themes and critical questions arising from recent developments at the intersection of AI and Copyright law.

A magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware today issued a Report and Recommendation to grant a motion by VideoAmp, Inc. to dismiss The Nielsen Company (US) LLC’s complaint against it for infringement of Nielsen’s patents related to audience measurement systems because the patents are directed to ineligible subject matter… According to today’s opinion, the ‘402 patent is “generally directed to associating identified user data with media being displayed.”

The UK Supreme Court today issued a landmark judgment on AI patentability that is likely to impact all software patents going forward. The decision in Emotional Perception v. Comptroller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks primarily held that the approach taken in Aerotel Ltd v Telco Holdings Ltd [2006] EWCA Civ 1371; [2007] Bus LR 634; [2007] RPC 7 (Aerotel) should no longer be followed. Under Aerotel, courts and examiners consider a four-step test for assessing whether a claim is excluded from patent eligibility: 1) properly construe the claim, 2) Identify the actual/ alleged contribution, 3) Ask whether the contribution is excluded and 4) check if the contribution is technical.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today issued a precedential decision in Ingevity Corporation v. BASF Corporation, affirming a jury verdict that found Ingevity liable for unlawful tying under federal antitrust laws. On appeal, the CAFC upheld the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware’s decision to deny Ingevity’s post-trial motions for judgment as a matter of law (JMOL). As a result, the ruling included an award of more than $84 million in trebled damages to BASF Corporation (BASF). Judge Lourie authored the unanimous opinion, joined by Judges Prost and Cunningham.

On Tuesday, news reports indicated that U.S. Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced the Copyright Labeling and Ethical AI Reporting (CLEAR) Act into Congress. If enacted as drafted, the bill would establish mandatory reporting requirements for companies developing artificial intelligence (AI) models that are trained using original works that are protected under U.S. copyright law, and would create an additional cause of action for copyright owners alleging that generative AI developers failed to give such notice with respect to their works.

During a Subcommittee hearing of the Senate Appropriations Committee today, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick confirmed to Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) that he does not plan to implement his proposal to charge patent holders a percentage their patents’ value. The Commerce, Justice, Science, and Related Agencies Subcommittee held the hearing primarily to as Lutnick questions about issues surrounding broadband deployment funding. Coons, however, took the opportunity to ask Lutnick about a proposal first reported by the Wall Street Journal in July 2025 to charge a 1%-5% patent “tax” on the value of granted U.S. patents.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday affirmed a district court’s summary judgment ruling that six patents owned by Innovaport LLC are invalid for claiming ineligible subject matter under 35 U.S.C. § 101. The Federal Circuit agreed that the patents, which are directed to systems and methods for providing in-store product location information, claimed an abstract idea without adding a sufficient inventive concept to make them patent-eligible.

Patent portfolios are frequently discussed in terms of size, technological breadth, or litigation potential. Those characteristics may be easy to measure, but they are not what determines whether a portfolio succeeds or fails. At their core, patent portfolios are business assets that must be managed deliberately and strategically. When they are not, they become cost centers that quietly consume resources without delivering meaningful competitive advantage.

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.

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.