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October 08, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Oct. 7 rejected a petition for panel rehearing from the Board of Regents of the University of Texas System (UT), leaving in place the panel’s July ruling that a technology company was entitled to a judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) in its favor in a dispute over a patent describing a biodegradable fiber implant. The ruling reversed a Delaware federal jury’s findings in favor of the patent holder because a prior art patent disclosed every asserted claim of the patent at issue.
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October 08, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Texas federal judge erred by dismissing a third-party indemnification claim from a patent infringement suit as moot after the entry of summary judgment of noninfringement, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled; the panel vacated the judgment and remanded for further proceedings, noting that the parties agreed that dismissal for lack of supplemental jurisdiction by the district court would be appropriate.
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October 07, 2026
NEWARK, N.J. — A federal judge granted AstraZeneca’s bid to restrict a defense expert’s testimony in litigation over patents covering its cancer drug Lynparza pending in a New Jersey federal court, ruling that the expert is qualified to testify about medicinal chemistry but not genetics, cancer cell biology, clinical trial interpretation or cancer treatment.
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October 07, 2026
PEORIA, Ill. — A federal judge in Illinois granted the Illinois Agricultural Association’s (IAA) motion for a preliminary injunction in its second trademark infringement case against a media group focusing on content for rural listeners, finding that IAA is likely to succeed on its claims that the media group infringed its “RFD” trademarks.
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October 07, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court denied Sunoco Partners Marketing & Terminals LP’s petition for a writ of certiorari, leaving in place a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel’s decision affirming a Delaware federal judge’s exclusion of parts of an expert’s patent damages theories for failure to apportion properly.
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October 06, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied separate requests from a patent holder and its counsel William P. Ramey III for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc, leaving in place a panel’s decision to affirm a Texas federal judge’s dismissal of the patent holder’s suit against Volkswagen Group of America Inc. and an award of more than $200,000 in attorney fees to the car maker; the order also leaves in place the panel’s timeliness finding that led it to reject Ramey’s appeal of the judge’s order holding him jointly and severally liable.
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October 06, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 5 again denied an Italian wine company’s application to recall and stay a mandate of the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which in June vacated a New York federal judge’s summary judgment finding that a 2004 U.S. Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) decision had preclusive effect on the issue of likelihood of confusion on claims that a California winery infringed the Italian winery’s trademarks.
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October 06, 2026
LOS ANGELES — Summary judgment in favor of Quizlet Inc. stands following a California federal judge’s conclusion that a nursing test preparation company did not meet the standard for reconsideration in an artificial intelligence-related copyright infringement lawsuit.
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October 05, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court on Oct. 5 denied a patent owner’s request that it consider the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals’ decision to affirm a Washington federal judge’s dismissal of its infringement complaint against Google LLC, leaving in place the panel’s January holding that the asserted claims of the patent were directed at an unpatentable abstract idea.
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October 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a pair of Oct. 1 opinions, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Delaware federal judge’s finding that a technology company’s patent claims asserted against Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and its American affiliate were invalid, agreeing with Samsung’s alternative argument that the claims were improperly enabled while disagreeing with the judge’s finding that the claims were indefinite; the panel also dismissed as moot the plaintiff-appellant’s separate challenge to findings from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that one of the claims was unpatentable as obvious.
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October 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Over the objections of one circuit judge, the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals denied a petition from Eli Lilly and Co. (Lilly) for rehearing en banc and panel rehearing, leaving in place a panel’s April decision to reverse a Massachusetts federal judge’s judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) of invalidity on patents held by Teva Pharmaceuticals International GmbH and its American affiliate for lack of written description and enablement; the denial of rehearing also leaves in place the panel’s decision to reinstate the jury’s verdict.
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October 02, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — The Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals became at least the second federal appellate court to address artificial intelligence copyright issues after unsealing an opinion finding that while the technology is new, traditional principles govern the case and that a legal research competitor’s use of copyrighted material was not fair use.
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October 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Georgia federal judge failed to adequately explain why a plaintiff-appellee technology company’s infringement suit was reasonable despite a summary judgment ruling of invalidity, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel ruled, vacating the judge’s denial of the defendant-appellant’s motion for attorney fees and sanctions and remanding for further proceedings.
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October 02, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — A Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a California federal judge’s decision to dismiss coders’ claims that Microsoft Corp. and online code platform GitHub Inc. violated the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by using artificial intelligence (AI) tools to generate new code; the panel determined that the generation of new code without attribution could not support a claim that the technology entities removed copyright management information (CMI).
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October 02, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a New Jersey federal judge’s dismissal of a professor’s copyright infringement suit against the New Jersey Institute of Technology, finding that the alleged similarities between two machine-learning courses concerned unprotected ideas and that the potentially protected expression of these ideas differed too much for a reasonable fact finder to find substantial similarity.
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October 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Oct. 1 affirmed a Delaware federal judge’s judgment for defendants-appellees in a contract and trade secret dispute that formerly involved patent infringement claims, finding that the plaintiff-appellant forfeited its interference and damages theories advanced on appeal, which the panel said was a sufficient reason to affirm.
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October 01, 2026
NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York denied a media outlet’s motion to dismiss a copyright complaint filed against it by Playboy Enterprises International Inc., holding that the factors weighed against a finding that the outlet’s use of a model’s photograph in an article about Playboy’s return to nude photos constituted a fair use.
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October 01, 2026
GREEN BAY, Wis. — For the second time, a Wisconsin federal judge has granted summary judgment of invalidity to a defendant eyeglass company, this time analyzing under the clear and convincing evidence standard required by the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals after it vacated the judge’s earlier grant of summary judgment; the appeals court said in October 2025 that the judge was wrong to apply issue preclusion based on prior findings from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) when granting summary judgment because PTAB uses a different standard of proof from the one required for district courts.
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September 30, 2026
PHILADELPHIA — A Third Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Sept. 29 issued a judgment announcing a sealed opinion affirming summary judgment for legal publisher Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH on claims that Ross Intelligence Inc. trained its artificial intelligence on copyrighted material.
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September 30, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed the dismissal of a patent complaint filed by the receivership estate for an advertising technology company against Google LLC and YouTube LLC, agreeing with a California federal judge that the asserted patents were ineligible as directed at the abstract idea of targeting advertisements to users of the internet.
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September 29, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. —Qualcomm Inc. tells the U.S. Supreme Court in a Sept. 28 brief that it should deny Federal Express Corp.’s petition for a writ of certiorari, arguing that the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals was correct to hold that it was barred from reviewing whether Qualcomm identified all real parties in interest in inter partes review (IPR) proceedings before the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB); on Sept. 29, a technology company filed an amicus curiae brief in support of FedEx, urging the court to hear FedEx’s arguments.
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September 29, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a win for Apple Inc., a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a ruling from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that six patent claims asserted against Apple involving speech recognition technology were unpatentable as obvious; the panel held that the patent’s term “feature vector” includes the vector-quantized codewords disclosed in an earlier patent.
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September 28, 2026
SAN DIEGO — A California federal jury on Sept. 25 held that Apple Inc. owes $5.7 billion in damages for infringing a company’s patents covering haptic feedback technology; the jury found that Apple infringed the asserted claims of the patents but did not do so willfully and that Apple failed to show that the asserted claims were invalid.
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September 28, 2026
CHICAGO — An Illinois federal judge entered a final judgment in favor of a photojournalist whose copyrighted footage of protests that occurred in summer 2020 was infringed by the city of Chicago and a former top police officer, ordering that the photojournalist be paid nearly $200,000 in damages, prejudgment interest and costs and entering a permanent injunction against the city defendants; however, the judge denied the photojournalist’s motion for attorney fees.
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September 25, 2026
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A federal judge in California issued an amended judgment that established that Impossible Foods Inc. owes $1.5 million in damages after a jury found in March that it infringed a website’s mark on the word “Impossible”; the judge also canceled an upcoming retrial on the issue of punitive damages after Impossible X LLC waived its right to a retrial.