Intellectual Property

  • June 18, 2024

    Microsoft Reaches Deal With Patent Biz After $242M Verdict

    Microsoft indicated on Tuesday that it has decided to settle a fight with a litigation outfit that won a $242 million verdict from a Delaware federal jury over patents bought from a company that developed Apple's Siri software.

  • June 18, 2024

    Fed. Circ. Won't Revive Philips Communication Patent Claims

    The Federal Circuit on Tuesday sided with Patent Trial and Appeal Board judges who gutted claims in a Philips patent challenged by a Chinese chipmaker that is facing an infringement suit in Delaware.

  • June 18, 2024

    USPTO Hears Array Of Ideas For Altering Director Review

    Numerous groups have offered suggestions to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office on the process where the agency's director reviews Patent Trial and Appeal Board decisions, from adjusting which cases are subject to review to barring the director from personally making decisions.

  • June 18, 2024

    11th Circ. Orders New Shrimp Secrets Trial Over Judge's Exit

    The Eleventh Circuit ordered a new trial in a trade secrets dispute involving breeders of disease-resistant shrimp, saying Tuesday that a magistrate judge who oversaw the trial's conclusion so that a federal judge could catch a flight exceeded his authority by answering jury questions and rejecting a defense counsel's request for clarification on damages awarded.

  • June 18, 2024

    Megan Thee Stallion Escapes IP Suit Over 'Savage' Song

    A Manhattan federal judge concluded Tuesday that rapper and songwriter Megan Thee Stallion did not rip off music from a hip-hop producer to create her hit song "Savage" in 2020, saying the plaintiff failed to show that she and the other defendants had access to his composition or that the two songs are substantially or strikingly similar.

  • June 18, 2024

    Starbucks Among Eateries Facing IP Suits Over Ordering Tech

    Starbucks, Denny's and three other restaurants are the latest to face a patent-licensing company's lawsuits in Texas for allegedly infringing a patent that lets customers place mobile orders on an app or website using a real-time menu that can make personalized suggestions.

  • June 18, 2024

    ITC To Eye Samsung Loss In LCD Patent Suit Against Rival

    The U.S. International Trade Commission decided Monday to review several issues in a judge's decision that cleared Manufacturing Resources International Inc. in a suit by Samsung accusing it of infringing LCD digital display patents.

  • June 18, 2024

    Rival Pool Supply Co. Looks To Duck Blueworks Ch. 11 Stay

    Pool supply company Hayward Industries Inc. has asked a bankruptcy court for a reprieve from the automatic stay protecting its bankrupt rival Blueworks Corp. as it seeks to secure final orders upholding a $16 million false advertising and unfair business practices judgment.

  • June 18, 2024

    Justices Urged To Take Case On USPTO Home Address Rule

    Five organizations have expressed support for a small North Carolina law firm asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's decision to require trademark applicants to disclose their home addresses — a decision that should have had public input, according to amicus briefs filed over the past week.

  • June 18, 2024

    Uber And Lyft Dodge Tracking Patent Litigation

    A California federal court has issued a pair of patent eligibility rulings that have ended an inventor's infringement litigation against ride-hailing apps Uber and Lyft.

  • June 18, 2024

    Ex-Yukos Oil Investors Auction Russian Vodka TMs For €1.6M

    The former shareholders of Yukos Oil Co. said Monday they have auctioned the Benelux rights to trademarks for 18 Russian vodka brands, including Stolichnaya and Moskovskaya, as they continue their effort to enforce $50 billion in arbitral awards against Russia.

  • June 18, 2024

    Samsung Bioepis Denies Infringing Blood Treatment Patent

    Samsung Bioepis has fought back against a bid by Alexion to prevent it from selling a biosimilar version of a patented blood treatment drug by a rival, telling a court that this will not infringe the protections of an AstraZeneca subsidiary over the medicine.

  • June 17, 2024

    Startup Wants To Add More Than $200M To Boeing IP Verdict

    Zunum Aero Inc. is urging a Washington federal judge to significantly boost a $72 million jury verdict against the Boeing Co. for misappropriating the electric jet startup's trade secrets, including adding $162.5 million in exemplary damages and nearly $52 million in legal costs and interest.

  • June 17, 2024

    Microsoft Renews Sanctions Bid Against Texas IP Law Firm

    Microsoft asked a Texas federal court Friday to order Ramey LLP to pay its $100,000 attorneys' fees tab for "vexatiously" pursuing infringement litigation against it, even when the patent plaintiffs firm's now-former client CTD Networks LLC called for it to end.

  • June 17, 2024

    NJ Firm Defends Lien On Ex-Client's Patents After Unpaid Bills

    A major New Jersey law firm said it has a "common law" right to place a lien on its former client's patents without telling it, after the "failed" biopharmaceutical startup fired the firm and stopped paying its outstanding legal bills.

  • June 17, 2024

    Judge Cements Decision Clearing Cisco From $2.75B Ruling

    There will be not be a third trial for a cybersecurity startup that has seen its multibillion-dollar patent win turn into nothing at all, a Virginia federal judge has decided, after a second trial found that Cisco wasn't actually infringing its patents.

  • June 17, 2024

    'Anderson Method' Copyright Claim Gets Cut Ahead Of Trial

    A California federal judge has handed Tracy Anderson's former employee Megan Roup a summary judgment win on the celebrity fitness trainer's copyright claim accusing Roup of ripping off her "Tracy Anderson Method" exercise routines, but concluded a jury should decide Anderson's sole remaining breach-of-contract claim in an upcoming November trial.

  • June 17, 2024

    Male Enhancement Pills Infringe RAW Trademark, Co. Says

    HBI International, the American distributor of the RAW line of smoking products, has filed a lawsuit in Georgia federal court alleging Mash Enterprise LLC used "identical copies" of its trademarks, trade dress and copyrighted packaging to sell male enhancement pills and beverages.

  • June 17, 2024

    Top Patent Eligibility Rulings In The Decade Since Alice

    The U.S. Supreme Court's Alice v. CLS Bank decision 10 years ago this week led to scores of inventions being found ineligible for patenting, and rulings since then have fleshed out the law on the contentious topic. Here's a look at the most notable patent eligibility decisions after Alice.

  • June 17, 2024

    Huawei Slams Netgear's 'Tenuous' RICO Case

    Huawei has responded to a racketeering and antitrust case from a major U.S. maker of Wi-Fi routers by calling it "rife with tenuous legal and factual claims" and comparing its reworking of patent infringement allegations to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission's failed antitrust case against Qualcomm.

  • June 17, 2024

    Fed. Circ. Says Errors Led To Injunction In Trade Secrets Suit

    A Federal Circuit panel on Monday overturned a preliminary injunction against a South Korean insulin pump patch manufacturer that allegedly stole trade secrets from a rival, saying a Massachusetts federal court made a series of errors in its determination to grant an injunction.

  • June 17, 2024

    Boeing, Virgin Can't Agree To Injunction's Scope In IP Row

    Boeing and Virgin Galactic have clashed over whether Virgin can share information with outside contractors gleaned as part of a failed aircraft development contract, as Boeing's suit accusing Virgin of breaching the deal and misappropriating trade secrets moves forward in Virginia federal court.

  • June 17, 2024

    Repeat Violations Land Ore. Forwarder Export Denial Order

    An Oregon-based package forwarder has lost export privileges just days before clearing a three-year probationary period for alleged unlicensed rifle scope exports, after an audit revealed 176 new violations, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced Monday.

  • June 17, 2024

    Tesla Slaps Supplier With $1B EV Battery Trade Secrets Suit

    Tesla is accusing one of its suppliers of corporate espionage in a $1 billion California federal lawsuit, saying that Matthews International has even tried to claim it invented the stolen trade secrets for manufacturing electric vehicle batteries by incorporating the confidential information into patent filings.

  • June 14, 2024

    Meta Halts AI Tech Debut In EU After Regulatory Backlash

    Meta Platforms Inc. said Friday that it was putting on hold plans to expand its artificial intelligence offerings to the European market after the Irish privacy regulator raised concerns about the company's efforts to use public content posted on Facebook and Instagram to fuel these models.

Expert Analysis

  • Does Expert Testimony Aid Preliminary IPR Responses?

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    Dechert attorneys analyze six years of patent owners' preliminary responses to inter partes review petitions to determine whether the elimination of the presumption favoring the petitioner as to preinstitution testimonial evidence affected the usefulness of expert testimony in responses.

  • Rebuttal

    Double-Patenting Ruling Shows Terminal Disclaimers' Value

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    While a recent Law360 guest article seems to argue that the Federal Circuit’s Cellect decision last year robs patent owners of lawful patent term, the ruling actually identifies how terminal disclaimers are the solution to the problem of obviousness-type double patenting, say Jane Love and Robert Trenchard at Gibson Dunn.

  • Series

    Swimming Makes Me A Better Lawyer

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    Years of participation in swimming events, especially in the open water, have proven to be ideal preparation for appellate arguments in court — just as you must put your trust in the ocean when competing in a swim event, you must do the same with the judicial process, says John Kulewicz at Vorys.

  • How Courts Are Interpreting Fed. Circ. IPR Estoppel Ruling

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    In the year since the Federal Circuit’s Ironburg ruling, which clarified the scope of inter partes and post-grant review estoppel, district court decisions show that application of IPR or PGR estoppel may become a resource-intensive inquiry, say Whitney Meier Howard and Michelle Lavrichenko at Venable.

  • Should NIL Collectives Be Allowed Tax-Favored Status?

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    Arguments are being made for and against allowing organizations to provide charitable contribution tax deductions for donations used to compensate student-athletes, a practice with impacts on competition for student-athletes and overall tax fairness, but ultimately it is a question for Congress, say Andres Castillo and Barry Gogel at the University of Maryland School of Law.

  • What 100 Federal Cases Suggest About Changes To Chevron

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    With the U.S. Supreme Court poised to overturn or narrow its 40-year-old doctrine of Chevron deference, a review of 100 recent federal district court decisions confirm that changes to the Chevron framework will have broad ramifications — but the magnitude of the impact will depend on the details of the high court's ruling, say Kali Schellenberg and Jon Cochran at LeVan Stapleton.

  • Patent Damages Jury Verdicts Aren't Always End Of The Story

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    Recent outcomes demonstrate that patent damages jury verdicts are often challenged and are overturned approximately one-third of the time, and successful verdict challenges typically occur at the appellate level and concern patent validity and infringement, say James Donohue and Marie Sanyal at Charles River.

  • Manufacturers Should Pay Attention To 'Right-To-Repair' Laws

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    Oregon’s recently passed "right-to-repair" statute highlights that the R2R movement is not going away, and that manufacturers of all kinds need to be paying attention to the evolving list of R2R statutes in various states and consider participating in the process, says Courtney Sarnow at Culhane.

  • Why High Court May Have Rejected IP Obviousness Appeal

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    Attorneys at Womble Bond analyze possible reasons the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Vanda Pharmaceuticals' request to review the Federal Circuit’s reasonable expectation of success standard for determining obviousness, including that the court was unpersuaded by the company's argument that Amgen v. Sanofi places a bind on drug developers.

  • Opinion

    Viral Deepfakes Of Taylor Swift Highlight Need For Regulation

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    As the nation grapples with addressing risk from artificial intelligence use, the recent circulation of AI-generated pornographic images of Taylor Swift on the social platform X highlights the need for federal legislation to protect nonconsenting subjects of deepfake pornography, say Nicole Brenner and Susie Ruiz-Lichter at Squire Patton.

  • A Guide To Using The DTSA For Misappropriation Recourse

    Excerpt from Practical Guidance
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    Nicholas Armington at Mintz explains the ins and outs of drafting a misappropriation complaint under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, and how and why companies should think strategically about federal and state law when filing a claim.

  • How Cos. Can Protect IP In Light Of FTC Noncompete Rule

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    While several groups are challenging the Federal Trade Commission’s recently approved rule banning noncompetition agreements, employers should begin planning other ways to protect their valuable trade secrets, confidential information and other intellectual property, says Thomas Duston at Marshall Gerstein.

  • The Fed. Circ. In April: Hurdles Remain For Generics

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    The Federal Circuit’s recent Salix v. Norwich ruling — where Salix's brand-name drug's patents were invalidated — is a reminder to patent practitioners that invalidating a competitor's patents may not guarantee abbreviated new drug application approval, say Sean Murray and Jeremiah Helm at Knobbe Martens.

  • Don't Use The Same Template For Every Client Alert

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    As the old marketing adage goes, consistency is key, but law firm style guides need consistency that contemplates variety when it comes to client alert formats, allowing attorneys to tailor alerts to best fit the audience and subject matter, says Jessica Kaplan at Legally Penned.

  • Series

    Walking With My Dog Makes Me A Better Lawyer

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    Thanks to my dog Birdie, I've learned that carving out an activity different from the practice of law — like daily outdoor walks that allow you to interact with new people — can contribute to professional success by boosting creativity and mental acuity, as well as expanding your social network, says Sarah Petrie at the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office.

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