Yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reversed and remanded the Southern District of New York’s dismissal of trade secret misappropriation claims filed against fintech company Arcesium by rival SS&C Technologies. Deciding that a broad definition of “use” under the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) was consistent with Second Circuit case law, the appellate court held that the district court erred in finding no misappropriation of SS&C’s alleged trade secrets and improperly credited Arcesium’s explanation of emails attached to SS&C’s complaint at the motion to dismiss stage.

Advocate General Maciej Szpunar of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) issued an opinion on Tuesday in the first case on generative AI to reach the Court. The opinion ultimately held that “the retrieval and reuse, in real time, of online press publications by AI chatbots in order to generate answers to user queries may, in certain circumstances, infringe the rights of press publishers.” The opinion is nonbinding on the CJEU.

On October 14, 2026, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced the Rare Disease Framework Initiative. The goal of this effort is quite essential for patients with rare (orphan) diseases – to develop an approach for assessing medicines for orphan diseases with a focus on the evidence that can be gathered for this assessment. The FDA proposes to include disease characteristics, patient needs, patient population size, and characteristics of orphan medications. The initiative does not itself establish new approval standards. Although the initiative relates to regulatory evidence matters, it also raises a separate legal question about the evidence needed to support patent claim scope.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, we have a discussion about the IP risks associated with AI use and adoption, with Stephanie Curcio, Marlene Valderrama, Kendra Ervin and Rinat Shangeeta. The discussion reveals a consequential gap with how businesses are deploying AI. Many companies are moving faster to adopt AI than their governance, contracting and IP review processes can accommodate. For those responsible for protecting innovation and confidential information, the challenge is ensuring that enthusiasm for AI adoption does not obscure the consequences of how these tools are actually used.

A coalition of ten streaming, broadcasting, and audiovisual media organizations, including the Motion Picture Association (MPA) and the Streaming Innovation Alliance, sent a letter today to U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John Squires, urging him to “support strong public and private sector enforcement against abusive SEP licensing practices.” The signatories said that abuse of standard essential patents (SEPs) was undercutting the open process of setting standards for the video streaming technologies their members use.

In a procedural order dated October 22, 2026, the Milan Central Division of the Unified Patent Court (UPC) delivered a short ruling in Sandoz v. Novo Nordisk (UPC_CFI_2221/2026) that deserves more attention than its procedural posture suggests. The operative holding is a single sentence: the UPC has no jurisdiction to entertain a claim seeking a declaration that a composition, independently of a specific patent right, was obvious at a given priority date. Behind that line sits a question the court will keep meeting as it matures: what, exactly, is this court for, and where does its competence stop?

OpenAI published a post on Friday, titled “Fair use benefits everyone,” featuring excerpts from 20 filings that urge the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY) to find that training large language models (LLMs) on copyrighted works is fair use. All but one are amicus briefs filed on or before the October 30 deadline in In re OpenAI, Inc. Copyright Infringement Litigation, the multidistrict litigation (MDL) that combines copyright lawsuits filed against OpenAI and Microsoft by The New York Times and other news publishers, Ziff Davis, and a group of authors, led by the Authors Guild, seeking to proceed as a class.

Since April 5, 2026, a patent owner can file a paper opposing a request for ex parte reexamination (EPR) before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) decides whether to order it. Six months in, patent owners use the paper in about two of every five requests, requesters try to respond in most of those, and the Office keeps almost every response out. None of it has measurably changed how often reexamination is ordered. The order rate was already falling before the procedure began, and the small further decline since is not statistically significant.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday reversed a district court’s award of attorneys’ fees to Elysium Health, Inc., holding that the lower court erred in assessing the substantive strength of ChromaDex’s Section 101 position. The appeal is rooted in the CAFC’s 2023 decision affirming the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware’s grant of summary judgment for Elysium Health that the asserted claims of ChromaDex’s patent on an isolated form of vitamin B3 were directed to unpatentable subject matter under Section 101.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision Friday in Google LLC v. Sonos, Inc., affirming a summary judgment of non-infringement entered by the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The CAFC agreed with the district court’s constructions of the claim terms “utilized” and “private key,” each of which resolved one of Google’s two infringement theories.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the Federal Circuit reverses an exceptionality determination after finding that the patent owner raised Section 101 arguments requiring more than a simple application of Myriad; the Seventh Circuit rules that copyright ownership to a compilation of unpublished psychotherapy articles cannot prevent the otherwise authorized publication of a single article included within the compilation; and more.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Thursday affirmed a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) ruling that held certain claims of a patent for network intrusion monitoring and detection unpatentable as obvious. The opinion was authored by Judge Chen. U.S. Patent No. 7,895,641 is owned by BT Americas (BTA). Palo Alto Networks, Inc. petitioned for inter partes review (IPR) of the ‘641 patent, and the PTAB ultimately determined claims 1–7 and 15–17 would have been obvious in view of two prior art references.

The demo works. A potential customer is interested. Then the contract arrives, asking the company to confirm that it has the rights necessary to provide the product, protect customer information, and stand behind an infringement claim. The company’s customer commitments must match the rights it actually holds. A working demo alone cannot establish that match.

A meme can travel from a private joke to a global advertising campaign before its creator – or the owner of the image behind it – has time to object. Coined by Richard Dawkins in 1976 to describe a unit of cultural transmission that replicates and mutates as it spreads, “memes” include reaction GIFs, catchphrases, and familiar templates such as “Distracted Boyfriend” and “Surprised Pikachu.” For brands and creators, that speed and reach can be irresistible: the right meme, deployed at the right moment, can reach millions within hours.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) issued a decision today in In re Wenkman affirming a Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decision that upheld the rejection of all pending claims in a pro se applicant’s patent application directed to a computer-implemented method for bartering groceries and other goods for silver and gold. The CAFC agreed with the Board that the claims are directed to an abstract idea and lack an inventive concept under 35 U.S.C. Section 101.