-
September 10, 2026
CINCINNATI — In an order filed in two related cases, a Sixth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel denied a pro se defendant-appellant’s request for a writ of mandamus in which he sought an audit of a trademark and harassment dispute with the appellant’s former employer; the panel said the man failed to show that his earlier appeal was not an adequate remedy.
-
September 10, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In its merits brief, a coffee company tells the U.S. Supreme Court that a trademark’s inherent or conceptual strength is a factual question because the inquiry asks how consumers perceive the mark in connection with the relevant goods, arguing that the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals is an outlier for considering similarity to be a question of law.
-
September 10, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Sept. 9 denied a Dutch software company’s request to stay a North Carolina federal judge’s amended preliminary injunction and delay trial while it sought review by the high court in a dispute over a North Carolina company’s trademarked branding, copyrighted code and trade secrets.
-
September 09, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Sept. 8 affirmed a California federal judge’s decision to award more than $700,000 in attorney fees against a plaintiff-appellant entity in a dispute over patents covering three-dimensional sensing technologies, finding that the record does not establish that the plaintiff-appellant conducted an adequate presuit investigation.
-
September 04, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a determination from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) that certain claims of a patent describing a vitamin D treatment held by a couple were unpatentable as obvious, determining that substantial evidence supported PTAB’s underlying prior art factual findings and that the couple failed to properly develop certain theories before the board.
-
September 04, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In separately filed petitions for rehearing, a patent holder is requesting that the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals reconsider a panel’s decision to affirm a Texas federal judge’s dismissal of its suit against Volkswagen Group of America Inc. and an award of more than $200,000 in attorney fees, and the entity’s counsel William P. Ramey III is requesting that the appeals court reconsider its timeliness finding that led it to reject his appeal of the judge’s order holding him jointly and severally liable.
-
September 04, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel in July vacated a $12.7 million judgment against the United States awarded to software entities by a judge in the U.S. Court of Federal Claims, the entities argue in a recently filed petition for panel rehearing and rehearing en banc that the panel improperly approved a hypothetical license negotiation even though the parties had twice negotiated arm’s-length licenses establishing infringed software’s market value.
-
September 04, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel vacated a finding of obviousness from the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) in a dispute over a dental tool patent, finding that a prior art reference cannot be considered to have a provisional application’s filing date merely by satisfying procedural priority requirements; the application must provide written-description support for at least one published claim.
-
September 03, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a District of Columbia federal judge’s finding that a medical device repair exemption that allows for the circumvention of technological protection measures (TPMs) to access clinical-operation software to diagnose, maintain or repair a device was reasonable, saying the Library of Congress reasonably concluded that such access is likely fair use.
-
September 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Substantial evidence supported the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) factual findings that led to it determining that all claims in multiple patents held by a genomics company were unpatentable as obvious, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held; the panel rejected the appellant company’s challenge to PTAB’s motivation-to-combine analysis and other elements of its findings.
-
September 02, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) had substantial evidence to support its factual findings that underpinned its ruling that Robert Bosch LLC and Mercedes-Benz USA LLC (collectively, Bosch) failed to show that claims of patents describing fuel injector products were unpatentable as obvious, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held.
-
September 01, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The U.S. Supreme Court has requested responses from Qualcomm Inc. and the U.S. government in response to a petition for a writ of certiorari filed by Federal Express Corp. in which the shipping company asked the high court to review a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling that the appeals court 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).
-
August 27, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Aug. 26 partly vacated a finding from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office that patent claims held by a technology company related to cloud communication were unpatentable as obvious, finding that the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) wrongly construed certain elements of the claims.
-
August 27, 2026
SAN JOSE, Calif. — A California federal judge held that a technology company was estopped from making doctrine of equivalents arguments in support of its infringement claims against Dropbox Inc., finding that the company surrendered all equivalents between the original version of its patent claims and an amended version when it added a claim limitation that required virtual files be “indistinguishable” from local files.
-
August 25, 2026
NEW ORLEANS — In an opinion that a split Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel said involved multiple questions of first impression regarding the application of the Architectural Works Copyright Protection Act (AWCPA) and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) and a “thorny” question of appellate jurisdiction, the judge that wrote the majority opinion said that a section of the AWCPA does not reach copyrights in architectural plans as pictorial, graphic and sculptural works and could not support a Texas federal judge’s dismissal of an architectural firm’s architectural-work claims when the complaint did not establish that the challenged uses occurred after construction.
-
August 25, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Virginia federal judge rightly dismissed a complaint brought by inventor advocacy groups against the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (PTO) and its director because the groups alleged neither a cognizable organizational injury nor an identified member facing imminent future harm in their suit claiming that the PTO violated rulemaking procedures by using misleading language in patent cover letters, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held.
-
August 24, 2026
ATLANTA — A Florida federal judge correctly denied attorney fees for YouTube LLC and related entities (collectively, YouTube) after the video streamer prevailed on copyright infringement claims by a film company that owns rights related to culturally significant Spanish language films, an 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held. The panel said that because the suit was not frivolous or unreasonable, fees were not permissible under the Copyright Act.
-
August 21, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — Firms that represented publishers’ interests and authors involved in a $1.5 billion class action settlement between a large group of authors and Anthropic PBC in a copyright suit over texts used to train Anthropic’s artificial intelligence programs have filed two notices of appeal, challenging only a portion of the final judgment that relates to more than $100 million in attorney fees awarded to the class counsel.
-
August 21, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Texas federal judge’s decision to dismiss a patent holder’s suit against Volkswagen Group of America Inc. with prejudice and to award more than $200,000 in attorney fees; the panel also dismissed counsel William P. Ramey III’s appeal of the judge’s sanctions that held him jointly and severally liable for the fee award because Ramey failed to timely appeal the sanction in his own name.
-
August 20, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A District of Columbia Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel determined that a music service failed to establish jurisdiction for its challenge to the Copyright Royalty Board’s interpretation of licensing requirements, leaving it up to a District of Columbia federal judge to determine “what weight, if any, to assign to the Royalty Board’s non-binding regulatory interpretation” in an underlying royalties dispute.
-
August 19, 2026
NEW YORK — An independent music artist’s attempts to use a motion for reconsideration of a ruling dismissing one of his claims as a means to amend allegations in his artificial intelligence copyright action and comes too late to save the Tennessee Consumer Protection Act or common law claims, a federal judge in New York said in denying the motion.
-
August 19, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Substantial evidence supported the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board’s (PTAB) finding that a publication describing facial-analysis research was analogous prior art, a Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel held, affirming PTAB’s decision that claims of a patent held by television research entity Nielsen Co. (US) LLC were unpatentable as obvious.
-
August 19, 2026
NEW YORK — A Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel on Aug. 18 affirmed a New York federal judge’s denial of beverage markers’ motion to vacate a bench trial finding in defendants-appellees’ favor in a dispute over beverage trademarks; the panel agreed that the plaintiff-appellant entities provided no new evidence that the judge was misled by a fraudulent account about a disputed operating agreement.
-
August 18, 2026
SAN FRANCISCO — An expert in large language model (LLM) training and use easily passes the low bar for admissibility, and his reliance on an LLM for testing is not a reason to exclude his opinion that an artificial intelligence model memorizes authors’ styles and works, a proposed copyright class tells a federal judge in California in opposing the expert’s exclusion.
-
August 18, 2026
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals panel affirmed a Pennsylvania federal judge’s denial of a preliminary injunction in a dispute over a design patent for a hook for hanging handbags in closets, holding that the judge’s finding that the appellant was unlikely to succeed on the merits a reasonable conclusion due to differences between the design patent and the accused product; the panel issued an erratum to the opinion on Aug. 17, correcting a minor error.