Every case analysis on the site: copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secrets, and the right of publicity. Newest first.
The Second Circuit held a director's contribution to a film is not its own copyrightable work; the producer, as dominant author, owns the whole picture.
A former president took CGW's pricing and customer files, yet the court denied an injunction because the company took almost no measures to guard the data.
The Third Circuit held lawful possession, not title, lets a plaintiff sue for trade-secret misappropriation under Pennsylvania law, affirming a $3.1M award.
The Eighth Circuit held that trade secret misappropriation can be pled on information and belief when the proof sits in the defendant's sole control.
A federal court enjoined a nude drawing recognizable as Muhammad Ali, holding New York's statute reaches any portrait, not just photographs.
A California court held secret, patentable design concepts disclosed under an NDA can be trade secrets, affirming a judgment over $1.5M plus fees.
The Federal Circuit vacated the one-click preliminary injunction because Barnes & Noble raised a substantial question of validity Amazon could not rebut.
The Federal Circuit held a driveshaft manufacturing method ineligible under Section 101 for invoking Hooke's law, pushing Mayo deep into the mechanical arts.
The Fifth Circuit applied the Lanham Act to a U.S. cooperative's rice branding sold only in Saudi Arabia, an effects-based reach now narrowed by Abitron.
The PTAB's precedential Fintiv order set six factors for denying IPR institution in view of a parallel trial, reshaping petitioner strategy.
The Third Circuit's 1983 ruling that object code, ROM firmware, and operating systems are copyrightable expression built the software industry's legal floor.
The Ninth Circuit holds trademark counterfeiting requires likelihood of confusion, with no presumption from identical EYE DEW marks on dissimilar products.
How the Second Circuit's 1946 split between proof of copying and improper appropriation built the framework every music infringement trial still follows.
The Supreme Court held that replacing the worn fabric of a patented convertible top is permissible repair, not infringing reconstruction of the combination.
The Ninth Circuit held Fred Astaire clips in a dance-lesson video fell within California section 990's film exemption, a ruling that triggered the Astaire Act.
The Federal Circuit voided reissue handguard claims for lack of written description while finding a trade secret could cover what the patent never disclosed.
A Pennsylvania federal court refused to enjoin the FTC's non-compete rule, splitting with Texas on the agency's power. The rule later died anyway.
The Ninth Circuit held Bikram Choudhury's 26-pose hot yoga Sequence is an unprotectable idea, process, or system under § 102(b), not expression or choreography.
The Second Circuit held reduced-size Grateful Dead posters in a band biography were transformative fair use, and lost license fees alone were not market harm.
In 1908 the Supreme Court held the right to vend a book ends at the first authorized sale, the origin of the first-sale doctrine now in Section 109.
Judge Posner upholds the loss of a trade-secret verdict, explaining that a process published in a patent application ordinarily loses secrecy and that BondPro showed no measurable value.
The Ninth Circuit shielded a noncommercial gripe site from infringement and dilution claims but held that ACPA cybersquatting requires no commercial use.
The Fourth Circuit held that a festival website's use of a photographer's cityscape photo found via Google failed all four fair use factors.
The My Sweet Lord case: George Harrison infringed He's So Fine without meaning to, because access plus substantial similarity requires no intent to copy.
The Seventh Circuit froze a good-faith Illinois junior user inside a 20-mile Mattoon enclave and gave the federal registrant the rest of the state.
The Federal Circuit's conception standard: inventorship fixes when the idea is definite and permanent, so NIH scientists confirming AZT were not co-inventors.
The Second Circuit held the Seinfeld Aptitude Test infringed: a show's fictional facts are protected expression, and repackaging them for fans is not fair use.
The Federal Circuit upheld a $57.6M NDA-breach verdict even though the underlying patent was invalid as anticipated, showing contracts can beat patents.
The Federal Circuit read a claim to require heating dough to 400 degrees, an absurd result, because courts construe claims as written.
The Ninth Circuit reversed an injunction over published tubular lock key codes, holding reverse engineering by lawful owners is not improper means.
The Ninth Circuit held a 1978 re-grant of Lassie rights did not extinguish the heir's Section 304(c) right to terminate her earlier 1976 assignment.
The Second Circuit holds that a literally false ad can be enjoined without proof of consumer deception, a template for competitor false-advertising suits.
The Supreme Court held in 1908 that a patentee who does not use its invention may still enjoin infringement, because the patent right is the right to exclude.
The Federal Circuit held a design patent for a pattern for a chair was not infringed by baskets, because claim language limits a design to its named article.
The Federal Circuit added two collaborators as co-inventors of Nobel-backed cancer-immunotherapy patents; contribution to conception need not span every claim.
The Federal Circuit voided a claim requiring an aesthetically pleasing interface, holding subjective terms need an objective anchor to be definite.
Federal Circuit held that clandestine, unauthorized planting of patented USDA grape varieties was not an invalidating public use, so the plant patents survived.
A DTSA seizure applicant stumbles at the threshold: the customer list was never shown to be a trade secret, so proof of copying alone could not carry it.
The Fourth Circuit holds the Defend Trade Secrets Act can apply extraterritorially where a US-based act furthers the theft, reaching a Dutch former distributor.
A New York court enjoined two executives who plotted a competing ad venture, but capped the injunction at six months because internet secrets go stale fast.
The Ninth Circuit revived surfers' misappropriation claims over a catalog photo, holding a likeness is not preempted by copyright in the image.
Washington's Supreme Court held that a memorized customer list can be a trade secret. The form of the information is legally irrelevant under the UTSA.
The Ninth Circuit held that delivering commissioned footage grants an implied nonexclusive license, because section 204(a) covers only ownership transfers.
The Supreme Court's corset case held that use by one person, with no duty of secrecy, is an invalidating public use even when no one can see the invention.
The Supreme Court held the Hatch-Waxman safe harbor covers work to win FDA approval of medical devices, not just drugs.
The Ninth Circuit held that verb use of google does not prove genericide because primary significance to consumers, not grammar, controls under the Lanham Act.
The Seventh Circuit kept $140M in trade-secret compensatory damages but held $280M in punitives constitutionally excessive, even under a state statutory cap.
The Federal Circuit's first RAND damages decision: juries must hear the patentee's actual RAND commitment and award only the incremental value of the invention.
The Ninth Circuit extended Rogers v. Grimaldi to video games: GTA's Pig Pen strip club beat the Play Pen's Lanham Act claims with artistic relevance above zero.
The Eleventh Circuit held delivering the I Have a Dream speech was a performance, not a general publication, and reversed summary judgment against Dr. King's estate.
The Third Circuit held Pocky's snack-stick design functional and unprotectable as trade dress, reading functional to mean useful rather than essential.
Seventh Circuit affirmed summary judgment against a plaintiff that shared technology with no NDA: zero precautions fails the reasonable-measures test.
The N.D. Cal. refused to dismiss section 3344 claims over Facebook's Sponsored Stories, holding ordinary users plausibly alleged their endorsements had value.
The Ninth Circuit held a nonprofit abandoned its FREECYCLE marks through naked licensing, having kept no contractual or actual control over its member groups.
The Ninth Circuit reversed the FTC: Qualcomm had no antitrust duty to license rival chipmakers, and FRAND breaches belong to contract and patent law.
The English High Court held Stable Diffusion is not an infringing copy for UK secondary infringement: it stores no Getty works and training was abroad.
The Ninth Circuit held that ACPA registration means initial registration only, so transferring a domain that predates the mark is not cybersquatting.
The Supreme Court's foundational statement of the doctrine of equivalents: a device that works the same way for the same result can still infringe.
The Second Circuit held the law of a celebrity's domicile at death governs descendibility, and under then-current California law the Marx estates had no claim.
The Ninth Circuit held the idea of a jeweled bee pin inseparable from its expression, so copyright could not stop competitors: the canonical merger case.
The Ninth Circuit refused to hold a Paris Hilton birthday card transformative as a matter of law, letting her 'That's hot' publicity claim proceed.
The Supreme Court voided a clay doorknob patent for want of invention, creating the 'ordinary mechanic' standard that Graham and Section 103 later codified.
The Federal Circuit held that in vitro and mouse-model data establish patent utility for a cancer drug candidate, well before FDA-grade human evidence exists.
A federal court approved a novel settlement giving the class a 23% equity stake in Clearview AI over its scraping of billions of face images. The Seventh Circuit vacated it in July 2026.
In re E.I. du Pont, 476 F.2d 1357 (CCPA 1973), built the thirteen-factor confusion test that still governs every Section 2(d) refusal and TTAB dispute.
The CCPA held a U.S. patent is prior art only as of its U.S. filing date, not its foreign priority date. The AIA later abolished the Hilmer doctrine.
The Federal Circuit holds the Paris Convention is not self-executing and Section 44 foreign-registration filings must satisfy the Lanham Act's Section 2 bars.
The Federal Circuit held a webpage lacking price and ordering information is mere advertising, not a point-of-sale display showing use in commerce.
The Federal Circuit held a lip-implant design claim cannot be anticipated by a look-alike art tool, because design claims are limited to their article.
The Federal Circuit affirmed refusal of .SUCKS because consumers see a gTLD, not a brand: the leading appellate word on failure to function as a mark.
The Federal Circuit set out the eight-factor test for whether practicing a claim demands undue experimentation, the USPTO's enablement standard today.
In 1895 the Supreme Court voided Sawyer and Man's claim to all fibrous incandescing conductors. The case remains the ancestor of full-scope enablement.
The 1918 Supreme Court decision that treated fresh news as quasi property between competitors and founded the misappropriation branch of unfair competition.
The Ninth Circuit held trade-secret identification is usually a fact question, and one secret described with particularity defeats early summary judgment.
The Ninth Circuit revived a small developer's SmartSync claim, holding a jury could find reverse confusion when a giant junior user swamps a senior mark.
The ITC banned imports of a Botox competitor for 21 months over trade-secret theft between Korean companies abroad, while reversing the strain-secrecy finding.
The Supreme Court held that a Section 145 applicant may introduce new evidence with no special limits, and the court must then find those facts de novo.
The Seventh Circuit held Chapman Kelley's wildflower garden was neither authored nor fixed, so neither copyright nor VARA could protect it, however original.
The Fifth Circuit held a franchisor's approved-source rule was not a tie because franchisees never had to buy from KFC, and found infringement where mark use was part of a scheme to mislead franchisees.
The Seventh Circuit found a satirical t-shirt fair use but rejected transformativeness as the test, a critique the Supreme Court echoed in Warhol.
The Federal Circuit's en banc ruling held that gross negligence alone cannot prove the deceptive intent required for inequitable conduct.
The Federal Circuit held that a limited exclusion order cannot bar downstream products from companies never named as respondents, reshaping ITC remedy strategy.
The Federal Circuit held a single Tennessee restaurant serving interstate travelers satisfies the Lanham Act's use in commerce requirement for registration.
The Ninth Circuit held that a right-of-publicity claim over a licensed vocal sample was preempted by the Copyright Act, drawing the line at imitation.
The D.C. Circuit held Lanham Act section 42 bars gray market imports that are physically and materially different from U.S. goods, even affiliate-made ones.
The Ninth Circuit holds a Madrid Protocol extension confers nationwide priority without U.S. use, but priority alone does not win an infringement suit.
In 1817 Justice Story held that useful means only not frivolous or immoral, setting the low utility bar that still governs patent law today.
The Fifth Circuit held Texas misappropriation law protects name and likeness but not a person's life story, defeating an ex-officer's claim over the novel Rush.
The Ninth Circuit held volunteer moderators may be a platform's agents, so posts they screen may fall outside DMCA 512(c)'s user-direction safe harbor.
The Federal Circuit held that specific rules for automating 3-D lip synchronization were a technological improvement, not an abstract idea under Section 101.
The Tenth Circuit held Meshwerks' digital wireframe models of Toyota vehicles were unoriginal copies, not copyrightable works, applying Feist to 3D modeling.
The Ninth Circuit held a race car's distinctive markings could identify its driver, extending misappropriation past name and face to any evocative indicia.
The Third Circuit held a photographer's printed gutter credit is copyright management information, so DMCA Section 1202 reaches ordinary credits too.
The Federal Circuit held that a single reference cannot anticipate by combining separate embodiments; the elements must appear arranged as in the claim.
The Ninth Circuit revived Don Newcombe's misappropriation claim, holding a beer-ad drawing of a distinctive windup could be readily identifiable as him.
The Ninth Circuit held the Beastie Boys' six-second flute sample was de minimis copying of James Newton's composition that no average audience would recognize.
The Third Circuit reads the TMA's presumption of irreparable harm as a bursting bubble: slight rebuttal evidence defeats it, and Nichino's injunction fails.
The Ninth Circuit holds FTDA fame must exist before the defendant's first arguably diluting use, moving the date to 1991 and unsettling Nissan's win.
A federal court enjoined the NCAA's transfer sit-out rule as a Sherman Act restraint, then a consent decree permanently ended it in 2024.
The Second Circuit held Astrud Gilberto had no Lanham Act mark in her famous 'Girl from Ipanema' recording, channeling the grievance to publicity law.
The Sixth Circuit's four-factor lost-profits test (demand, no substitutes, capacity, profit) is still the default framework in patent damages cases.
A federal court enjoined the NCAA's JUCO eligibility rule for Diego Pavia, treating lost NIL income as the competitive injury under the Sherman Act.
How a chocolate chip cookie recipe guarded by lock and key qualified as a Massachusetts trade secret, and why the secret element decided the case.
The Second Circuit held that a 1994 deal superseding Steinbeck's 1938 grant left no pre-1978 grant to terminate, defeating his heirs' Section 304(d) notice.
The Ninth Circuit tied the online display right to hosting with its server test and held Google's image-search thumbnails a transformative fair use.
The Ninth Circuit held that defective DMCA notices cannot create knowledge, salacious site names are not red flags, and a tracked policy satisfies 512(i).
The Federal Circuit affirmed cancellation of SCHIEDMAYER under Section 2(a) and held that TTAB judges are lawfully appointed after Arthrex.
The Ninth Circuit lets laches bar Lush's trademark infringement and cancellation claims, holding Petrella and SCA Hygiene do not reach the Lanham Act.
The Tennessee Court of Appeals held the right of publicity is descendible common-law property, making Tennessee the epicenter of post-mortem rights.
The Supreme Court held the first-sale doctrine limits the copyright importation right, so U.S.-made goods sold abroad may be reimported and resold freely.
The SDNY held that a grant to print, publish, and sell a work 'in book form' did not convey ebook rights, the template for every new-use licensing fight.
The S.D.N.Y. held New York's privacy statute is not intellectual property, so Section 230 shielded retailers, while a model's claim against the brand survived.
An SDNY judge dismissed publishers' DMCA claim over copyright info stripped for AI training: removal without dissemination is too abstract an injury.
The Ninth Circuit reached counterfeit sales in Mexican border towns and upheld a pretrial asset freeze, a holding reshaped by Abitron in 2023.
Illinois's Supreme Court tied non-compete enforceability to a legitimate business interest judged by the totality of the circumstances, rejecting rigid tests.
The Supreme Court held that a federal agency is not a 'person' entitled to petition for AIA post-issuance review at the PTAB.
The Seventh Circuit backed an engineer, holding an abandoned 2002 actuator prototype was too broad to be a concrete secret and its later use unreasonable.
In reviving oppositions to O.J. Simpson's marks, the Federal Circuit held any opposer with a real interest and a reasonable belief of damage may be heard.
The en banc Federal Circuit allowed foreseeable lost profits on a competing unpatented product, but denied recovery on convoyed goods lacking a functional link.
The California Court of Appeal held Rick Ross's use of a drug kingpin's name and persona was transformative, First Amendment-protected art.
The court held Marilyn Monroe could not devise a post-mortem publicity right through her will because no such right existed at her 1962 death.
The Supreme Court held that an infringer's profits must be apportioned so the copyright owner recovers only the share attributable to the infringed material.
A Utah federal court granted a rare DTSA ex parte seizure, persuaded by defendants who deleted data, used false identities, and would evade an ordinary order.
The Federal Circuit held eBay's four-factor test does not govern ITC exclusion orders, which issue on a violation unless public-interest factors say otherwise.
New York's high court held a model's photo in a consumer fashion column was newsworthy, not trade use, and that sections 50 and 51 are the exclusive remedy.
The Ninth Circuit held a Section 1202(b) plaintiff must prove the defendant knew stripping copyright metadata would likely induce or conceal infringement.
The Ninth Circuit held that a junior user who knows of a senior user's mark cannot claim the remote good-faith defense, deepening a circuit split.
The Eleventh Circuit held The Wind Done Gone was a protected parody of Gone With the Wind and vacated its injunction as an unconstitutional prior restraint.
An Illinois federal court held that alleging ex-employees know your secrets and joined a rival does not state a threatened-misappropriation claim.
The Federal Circuit ordered Teva to delist inhaler device patents, holding a patent must claim the drug's active ingredient for the FDA Orange Book.
The Second Circuit denied joint authorship to the dramaturg who shaped Rent: a copyrightable contribution means nothing without mutual intent to be co-authors.
Claim terms keep their ordinary meaning unless the patentee is its own lexicographer or clearly disavows scope. Consistent usage alone is not enough.
A federal court trimmed authors' claims against OpenAI, holding that calling every ChatGPT output an infringing derivative fails to plead similarity.
The Ninth Circuit held that Bambi's 1923 German publication without notice neither injected it into the U.S. public domain nor started its copyright term.
The first court to read the DTSA's whistleblower immunity treated it as an affirmative defense, not a pleading-stage shield, and let the suit proceed.
The Second Circuit upheld EEA and NSPA convictions because a trader stole code on paper, distinguishing Aleynikov and exposing gaps Congress later closed.
The Third Circuit's Taxol sting ruling holds attempt and conspiracy under the Economic Espionage Act need no actual trade secret, so stings can use decoys.
The Second Circuit affirms the Wavy Baby injunction, holding Jack Daniel's bars Rogers when a parody sneaker uses Vans' marks as source identifiers.
The Second Circuit held a strong arbitrary mark on related goods made confusion likely, ordering an injunction against VIRGIN WIRELESS phone stores.
Judge Kozinski held that eVISA likely dilutes the famous VISA mark, explaining how blurring erodes a brand even when it borrows an everyday word.
The Federal Circuit held U.S. courts should decline supplemental jurisdiction over foreign patent claims, forcing country-by-country enforcement.
The Second Circuit held Wallace's baroque silverware elements aesthetically functional because protecting them would significantly hinder competition.
A Georgia court granted OpenAI summary judgment over a ChatGPT hallucination, holding no reasonable reader would take the fabricated output as fact.
The Eighth Circuit held studio publicity posters entered the public domain, but merchandise that evokes the Wizard of Oz film characters still infringes.
A 1959 court held Listerine's maker owed royalties on an 1881 secret-formula contract even after the formula went public, because the contract set duration.
Pennsylvania's top court refused to enjoin a chemist with no confidentiality agreement from using formulas he developed, drawing the line on employee knowledge.
Whelan v. Jaslow (3d Cir. 1986) stretched software copyright past literal code to structure, sequence, and organization, a high-water mark Altai later curbed.
The en banc Federal Circuit killed the strong presumption against means-plus-function treatment, holding that nonce words like module invoke Section 112.
The Ninth Circuit measured a trade-secret injunction by the lead time the theft bought, capping relief at the head start, not a permanent ban.
The Federal Circuit held that secondary-considerations evidence lacks nexus when the feature driving a product's success was already disclosed in the prior art.
The Fifth Circuit's 1976 chrysanthemum ruling remains the fullest map of plant patent validity and infringement, centered on asexual reproduction.
Zatarain's FISH-FRI appeal gave trademark law its four descriptiveness tests and confirmed that competitors' fair use survives secondary meaning.
The largest damages award in Virginia history was set aside over four trial errors, and the whole case goes back for a new trial. A masterclass in trade-secret causation, and a warning that revenue is not damages.
Judge Alsup held that training a large language model on books is 'exceedingly transformative' fair use, while refusing to extend that blessing to the pirated library that fed it. The $1.5 billion settlement that followed shows where the real exposure lies.
When a beer ad hired Fat Boys imitators, a New York court let the look-alike, copyright, and Lanham Act claims proceed but held that copying a distinctive voice did not, by itself, violate the state privacy statute as it then read. The legislature added voice in 1995.
Two days after Bartz, Judge Chhabria also found AI training to be fair use, but went out of his way to say the result reflected a failure of advocacy, not a vindication of the practice. His 'market dilution' theory is the doctrine to watch.
New York's highest court refused to recognize a common-law right of privacy after a young woman's photo was used on flour ads, prompting the legislature to enact one within a year.
In 1905 Georgia's high court became the first in the nation to recognize a common-law right of privacy, after an insurer used an artist's photo in a fabricated advertisement.
Before the generative-AI rulings, a Delaware court rejected fair use for using copyrighted material to build an AI legal-research tool, and pointedly distinguished the software cases the technology industry had relied upon. Its reach is narrower than its reputation.
A federal court held that New Jersey's common-law post-mortem right of publicity lasts no more than 50 years, so Albert Einstein's rights had expired before GM ran its 2009 ad.
A federal court let voice actors' right-of-publicity and contract claims against an AI voice-cloning company proceed while dismissing their copyright theories. The decision maps the legal terrain for performers facing synthetic replicas of their voices.
The Supreme Court upheld the Lanham Act's bar on registering marks that use a living person's name without consent. The 9-0 result conceals a methodological fracture over whether history alone can resolve a First Amendment question.
The Sixth Circuit held that college athletes have no right of publicity in the televised broadcasts of their own games, calling the claim a legal fantasy under Tennessee law.
The Second Circuit affirmed that Ed Sheeran's 'Thinking Out Loud' does not infringe 'Let's Get It On,' reaffirming that a common chord progression and harmonic rhythm are not protectable, and that pre-1978 song copyrights are bounded by the deposit copy.
The Second Circuit held that scanning print books and lending the digital copies, even one-to-one, is not fair use. The decision turns on a narrowed conception of transformative use and the primacy of the licensing market.
The Ninth Circuit held that British law, not California's, governed Princess Diana's post-mortem publicity claim, and because Britain recognizes no such right, the estate's claim failed.
A jury rejected a $5 million right-of-publicity and false-light suit over Cardi B's 2016 mixtape cover, which photoshopped a man's distinctive back tattoo onto a model.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that a trademark plaintiff awarded the 'defendant's profits' may recover only the named defendant's profits, not those of its non-party affiliates. The result is a $43 million award vacated and a lesson in how to plead.
Missouri's high court let NHL enforcer Tony Twist sue Spawn creator Todd McFarlane, adopting a 'predominant purpose' test to balance the right of publicity against free speech.
A unanimous Supreme Court invalidated Amgen's antibody patents for failing to enable the full scope of what they claimed. The decision revives a demanding, century-old conception of the patent bargain with particular force in the life sciences.
The Sixth Circuit held that an artist's print of Tiger Woods's 1997 Masters win was transformative First Amendment speech, defeating both Lanham Act and right-of-publicity claims.
Judge Jerome Frank coined the phrase 'right of publicity' in a 1953 fight over baseball-card photos, recognizing a transferable property interest in one's own image.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit overruled the four-decade-old Rosen-Durling framework and folded design-patent obviousness into the flexible Graham analysis used for utility patents. Design patents just became easier to challenge.
The Eighth Circuit held that the Copyright Act preempts retired players' right-of-publicity claims over NFL Films productions, treating the historical highlight reels as expressive speech rather than ads.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit threw out a patent-damages verdict because the royalty expert's per-unit rate rested on lump-sum licenses that did not support it. The decision is a Rule 702 warning to the patent-damages bar.
A federal court blocked the NCAA from enforcing its ban on name-image-likeness deals during recruiting, finding the rule a likely antitrust violation that suppressed athletes' compensation.
George Carlin's estate sued the makers of an AI-generated comedy special impersonating him, and the case ended in a consent judgment and permanent injunction barring the fake from ever resurfacing.
The D.C. Circuit held that the Copyright Act requires a human author, foreclosing registration of a work generated autonomously by an AI system. The Supreme Court has now declined to disturb that conclusion.
The Fifth Circuit held that a trade secret can live in a novel combination of publicly known elements, and that sharing information with a few partners need not destroy its secrecy.
The Supreme Court's 7-2 decision in Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith (May 18, 2023) reframed fair use's first factor, holding that a commercial use sharing the same purpose as the original photograph does not become 'transformative' merely by adding new artistic meaning.
The Supreme Court scrapped the decades-old 'substantial competitive harm' test and held that commercial data is confidential under FOIA Exemption 4 when it is kept private and shared with the government in confidence.
In Tangle, Inc. v. Aritzia, Inc., the Ninth Circuit reversed a Rule 12(b)(6) dismissal, holding that the selection and arrangement of otherwise unprotectable sculptural elements can be protected and that kinetic, manipulable works are sufficiently 'fixed.'
Hawaii's Supreme Court adopted the majority view that the Uniform Trade Secrets Act displaces tort claims built on misused confidential information, even when that information is not a statutory trade secret.
In Hunley v. Instagram (9th Cir. 2023), the Ninth Circuit reaffirmed the Perfect 10 'server test,' holding that embedding an Instagram photo does not 'display a copy' and so cannot anchor direct or secondary infringement liability.
Weeks after the Defend Trade Secrets Act became law, a California court granted one of its first restraining orders against a departing employee, and nobody reached for the statute's dramatic ex parte seizure remedy.
Inside Mechanical Licensing Collective v. Spotify, the S.D.N.Y. dispute over whether adding audiobooks turns Premium into a royalty-discounted 'bundle' under the Section 115 compulsory mechanical license.
The Seventh Circuit refused to enforce a confidentiality agreement because the company took no other steps to guard its tablet-enclosure designs, holding that an NDA without reasonable secrecy measures is worthless.
The First Circuit enforced a Massachusetts noncompete against an executive who fled to California, holding that moving to a noncompete-banning state does not automatically defeat another state's law.
A December 2025 summary-adjudication order in Software Freedom Conservancy v. Vizio narrows the case but leaves the central question intact: whether an ordinary purchaser can enforce open-source copyleft as a third-party beneficiary on the eve of an August 2026 trial.
In a unanimous March 2026 judgment, the Supreme Court reversed the $1 billion verdict against Cox Communications, holding that knowledge alone cannot make an internet provider a contributory infringer, reshaping how the DMCA's § 512 safe harbor matters.
The First Circuit voided a tax firm's nondisclosure agreement as too sweeping and tossed its trade-secret verdict, holding that an NDA that bars general knowledge functions like an illegal noncompete.
The Eleventh Circuit held that scraping a public database with a bot can be improper means of acquiring a trade secret, even when any single piece of the data is free to view.
Judge Rakoff let The Intercept's DMCA § 1202(b)(1) copyright-management-information claim against OpenAI survive dismissal while tossing the § 1202(b)(3) claim, splitting from Raw Story v. OpenAI on standing and reshaping CMI litigation in AI-training cases.
The Seventh Circuit upheld a $407 million DTSA award based on worldwide sales, holding the trade-secret statute reaches foreign misappropriation when an act in furtherance occurs in the United States.
In Unicolors v. H&M (2022), the Supreme Court held that a copyright registration is not invalidated by an inaccuracy the applicant did not know was inaccurate, whether the error was one of fact or law.
The Second Circuit's 'Friday the 13th' ruling held that screenwriter Victor Miller was an independent contractor, not an employee, letting his § 203 termination notice stand and reclaiming the screenplay.
The decision that rejected the inevitable disclosure doctrine in California, holding it an after-the-fact noncompete that collides with the state's protection of employee mobility.
The Tenth Circuit affirmed summary judgment against a metals distributor that could not describe its trade secrets with enough particularity or show they were not readily ascertainable.
In Warner Chappell Music, Inc. v. Nealy (May 9, 2024), a 6-3 Supreme Court held that a copyright owner with a timely claim may recover damages for infringement no matter how long ago it occurred, while pointedly leaving the validity of the discovery rule itself undecided.
A California appellate court held that a trade-secret plaintiff can win an injunction and fees without proving damages, and that the cost of stopping the misappropriation is recoverable actual loss.
In Yonay v. Paramount, the Ninth Circuit affirmed summary judgment for Paramount over 'Top Gun: Maverick,' holding that a film sharing a real Navy program with a 1983 magazine article copies facts, not protected expression.
In Lil' Joe Records v. Wong Won (11th Cir. 2026), the court held that a 2 Live Crew member's copyright termination interest fell into his Chapter 7 bankruptcy estate, leaving the group one author short of the majority needed to reclaim five albums.
The Ninth Circuit held the federal Defend Trade Secrets Act does not force plaintiffs to identify secrets with reasonable particularity before discovery, splitting from California's state-law rule.
The Fifth Circuit affirmed a $168 million trade-secret judgment against Tata, endorsing unjust-enrichment damages based on the development costs a misappropriator avoided.
The Seventh Circuit's July 2024 decision in Motorola Solutions v. Hytera shows how the presumption against extraterritoriality and the predicate-act doctrine cabin recovery of foreign copyright damages (even amid blatant source-code theft) while the Defend Trade Secrets Act reaches worldwide sales.
The Fifth Circuit's 1974 ruling gave trade-secret law its flexible reasonable-royalty measure, letting plaintiffs recover the value of what the thief took even when the defendant earned no profit.
A star self-driving engineer downloaded 14,000 Google files, jumped to Uber, and pleaded guilty to one count of trade secret theft, drawing 18 months before a presidential pardon.
The Supreme Court rejected a categorical rule that 'generic.com' terms are unregistrable, holding that consumer perception alone determines whether such a composite is generic, reshaping distinctiveness analysis for the domain-name economy.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that whether a later mark may 'tack' onto an earlier mark's priority date is a question for the jury, locating the decisive moment in a clearance dispute in the fact-finder's assessment of consumer perception.
How a former Boeing engineer with 300,000 stashed documents became the first person convicted at trial of economic espionage for China, and what the Ninth Circuit affirmed.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a refusal to register CHESTEK LEGAL because the applicant used a P.O. box rather than a domicile address, and in doing so it treated the USPTO's domicile rule as a procedural rule exempt from notice-and-comment.
The Federal Circuit affirmed the rejection of a cold-fusion patent application, holding that once the Patent Office shows skilled artisans would reasonably doubt an invention's utility, the burden shifts to the applicant to prove it works.
The Fifth Circuit held that a component supplier denied direct licenses to cellular standard-essential patents suffered no cognizable injury, dooming its FRAND-based antitrust claims against the Avanci pool.
The Federal Circuit holds that a fraudulent Section 15 incontestability declaration cannot, by itself, justify cancellation of a trademark registration under Section 14.
The Ninth Circuit holds that a rushed, litigation-driven app launch is not the bona fide use in commerce the Lanham Act demands, and Apple gets the MEMOJI registration cancelled.
The Supreme Court held that a PTAB ruling on the one-year time bar for inter partes review is part of the institution decision and therefore cannot be appealed under Section 314(d).
The Supreme Court held that decisions to institute inter partes review are largely unappealable and that the PTAB could apply the broadest-reasonable-interpretation claim-construction standard.
The Ninth Circuit reversed itself after Jack Daniel's, holding that Rogers cannot shield a name used as a source identifier and sending the dispute back for an ordinary likelihood-of-confusion analysis.
The Federal Circuit held that a first-filed, first-issued, later-expiring patent claim cannot be invalidated for double patenting by a later-issued, earlier-expiring family member, rescuing patent-term adjustment.
A Manhattan jury found that Mason Rothschild's MetaBirkins NFTs infringed and diluted the famous Birkin mark, and that the First Amendment did not save them. The case maps how dilution doctrine and Rogers v. Grimaldi apply to digital goods.
The Federal Circuit held that infringing a plant patent requires asexual reproduction from the patented plant itself; an independently bred look-alike does not infringe.
The Fourth Circuit refused to register the configuration of Timberland's iconic tan work boot, holding that Timberland's evidence proved the fame of the whole boot but not acquired distinctiveness in the discrete features it claimed.
The Supreme Court's first reading of Section 103 set the durable framework for judging obviousness: scope of the prior art, differences, level of skill, and secondary considerations.
The Fourth Circuit held that a domain 'registration' actionable under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act includes later re-registrations, then sustained in rem jurisdiction over PRU.COM and a bad-faith finding against its Chinese owner.
The Federal Circuit held that a prior patent on a drug inherently anticipated a later patent on the metabolite the body inevitably produces, even though no one knew the metabolite existed.
A New York jury found a luxury reseller liable for willful counterfeiting and false association over Chanel-branded bags, holding that even items that left a Chanel factory can be 'counterfeit' when they fail the brand's quality controls.
The Supreme Court held that large, unexplained reverse-payment patent settlements can violate antitrust law and must be judged under the rule of reason, not shielded by the patent's scope.
The Supreme Court held that a debtor-licensor's rejection of a trademark license in bankruptcy breaches the contract but does not strip the licensee of its right to keep using the mark.
The Federal Circuit held that 'crucial' off-the-shelf components cannot prove a domestic industry; the economic prong of Section 337 demands a quantitative showing of real US investment.
The Supreme Court holds the Lanham Act's core infringement provisions reach only conduct where the infringing use in commerce is domestic, vacating a $96 million judgment.
The Federal Circuit removed a claimed co-inventor from Hormel's precooked-bacon patent, holding that a contribution mentioned only in passing was too insignificant to confer joint inventorship under the Pannu test.
The Fourth Circuit's FLANAX decision held that a Mexican trademark owner who never used its mark in U.S. commerce may nonetheless pursue Lanham Act unfair-competition and false-advertising claims, unsettling the conventional assumption that U.S. use is the price of admission.
The Federal Circuit held that infringement under 35 U.S.C. 271(g) for importing products made by a patented process does not require a single entity to perform every step of that process.
The Federal Circuit held that a false claim that a product feature is 'patented' can support a Lanham Act false-advertising claim, provided it misleads consumers about the nature, characteristics, or qualities of the goods, not merely their authorship.
The Federal Circuit revived Apple's bid for a permanent injunction against Samsung, holding that a patented feature need only have some connection to consumer demand, not exclusively drive it, to support irreparable harm.
A unanimous Supreme Court saved the doctrine of equivalents but disciplined it, requiring an element-by-element test and presuming estoppel when a claim amendment goes unexplained.
The Federal Circuit's first precedential machine-learning eligibility ruling holds that applying off-the-shelf models to a new data environment claims an abstract idea under § 101.
The en banc Federal Circuit confirmed that Section 112 demands a written description separate from enablement, invalidating Ariad's NF-kB patent for claiming a result it never showed it possessed.
The Federal Circuit held that selling a product made by a secret process starts the on-sale clock against a later patent on that process, and the America Invents Act did nothing to change it.
The Supreme Court held that a genetically engineered, oil-eating bacterium is patentable subject matter, opening the door to modern biotechnology patents.
The Federal Circuit upheld the ITC's import ban on certain Apple Watch models, validating Masimo's pulse-oximetry patents and a domestic industry built on prototypes.
The Federal Circuit reversed a PTAB obviousness finding because the petitioner showed the prior art's pieces existed but never explained why a skilled artisan would assemble them that way.
The Supreme Court held that isolated human genes are unpatentable products of nature, while synthetic cDNA can be eligible because it is not naturally occurring.
The Federal Circuit revived an oil-well viscometer patent by holding that a term of degree must be measured against the intrinsic record before a court reaches for a dictionary, while affirming a separate means-plus-function construction.
The Federal Circuit held that comparison prior art in a design-patent case must be applied to the same article of manufacture claimed in the patent, reshaping the ordinary-observer test.
Judge Alsup wiped out a $32.5 million verdict by holding that Sonos's zone-scene patents were equitably unenforceable for prosecution laches. Then the Federal Circuit reversed on prejudice. A roadmap to the limits of the continuation game.
The Federal Circuit held that relative claim terms like resilient and pliable can be definite when the intrinsic record gives skilled readers reasonable certainty about their scope.
A Texas court dismissed a rose breeder's plant-patent claim because it never alleged how its rivals asexually reproduced the patented varieties, spotlighting the unusual infringement element baked into 35 U.S.C. §§ 161-164.
How a 1970 plywood dispute produced the fifteen-factor framework that still governs reasonable-royalty damages in nearly every U.S. patent case decades later.
The Federal Circuit held that obviousness-type double patenting is measured against a patent's post-PTA expiration date, reshaping prosecution strategy for patent families.
The Federal Circuit reaffirmed that 'a microprocessor' can mean one or more, but held that 'said microprocessor' requires a single processor capable of performing every recited function.
The Federal Circuit adopts a skilled-searcher standard for Section 315(e)(2) estoppel and places the burden of proving it on the patent owner, not the petitioner.
Two clothing makers picked the same TIME OUT mark within weeks. The Fifth Circuit held that only genuine, public use in trade, not token shipments, establishes trademark priority.
The Federal Circuit reversed a claim construction that read 'barcode' to exclude bit codes, holding that K-fee's statements to the European Patent Office were too ambiguous to disclaim the term's full ordinary meaning.
The Supreme Court held that the federal food-labeling statute does not preclude competitors from bringing Lanham Act false-advertising suits over food and beverage labels.
A divided Federal Circuit held that a petitioner can challenge a trademark registration without owning proprietary rights in its own mark, even after signing away those rights in a settlement.
The Federal Circuit erased a $106M verdict, holding that canceling a broader claim during prosecution surrenders that subject matter for the doctrine of equivalents.
The Federal Circuit held that the Supreme Court's Lexmark framework governs who may petition to cancel a trademark registration, while affirming default judgment as a sanction for bad-faith litigation.
The Federal Circuit affirms a preliminary injunction barring a competing cancer-recurrence assay, sharpening how courts trace irreparable harm to the patented method through the causal-nexus requirement.
The Federal Circuit vacated a denial of a foreign anti-suit injunction, tying an SEP holder's right to injunctive relief to its good-faith FRAND-negotiation duty.
The CCPA separated de facto from de jure functionality and gave trade-dress law its four-factor test for deciding when a product's design can be a trademark.
After years of litigation over the 'Auditor's' pen mark, the Ninth Circuit confirmed that an accounting of an infringer's profits is an equitable remedy, not an automatic award.
The Supreme Court held that an incontestable trademark cannot be defended against on the ground that it is merely descriptive, giving registration real teeth after five years.
The Federal Circuit held that the Patent Act's word 'individual' means a human being, so an AI system called DABUS cannot be listed as an inventor, without deciding whether AI-assisted inventions are patentable at all.
When two companies used the Lapp name on non-competing electrical goods, the Third Circuit produced the ten-factor framework courts still use to gauge trademark confusion.
The Federal Circuit's reinstated $235 million verdict in GSK v. Teva tests whether a generic's carve-out label can shield it from induced infringement of a method-of-treatment patent.
The Ninth Circuit held that forcing franchisees to buy supplies as the price of a trademark license was an unlawful tie, reshaping how franchisors police quality.
The Supreme Court held that a patent owner can recover lost foreign profits flowing from a domestic act of infringement under 35 U.S.C. § 271(f)(2).
A divided Fourth Circuit held that a Monaco casino's U.S. advertising, paired with services rendered to American visitors abroad, was use in commerce supporting Lanham Act protection for the Casino de Monte Carlo mark.
The Fourth Circuit affirms dismissal of a DTSA complaint that defined its trade secrets three ways, holding that sweeping definitions fail the particularity that the statute's secrecy and value elements presuppose.
The Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that the First Amendment Rogers test does not apply when a parody uses another's trademark as a source identifier for its own goods.
The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of a software trade-secret claim because the owner delegated access control to a licensee and never required anyone downstream to keep the secret.
The Second Circuit's classic three-factor framework for the Lanham Act's reach abroad, refusing to apply U.S. trademark remedies against a Canadian retailer holding a valid Canadian mark.
How a Massachusetts jury found a competing insulin-patch maker liable for misappropriating Omnipod design secrets, and why the court then cut the award by nearly 90 percent.
The Ninth Circuit's answer to the original cybersquatter, holding that registering a famous mark as a domain name to sell it back to the owner was commercial use that diluted the mark under federal law.
The Ninth Circuit endorses a continued-use theory under the Defend Trade Secrets Act, then holds that Google's published patent applications extinguished the very secret the plaintiff needed.
How the Ninth Circuit imported initial interest confusion into web search, holding that a rival's domain name and hidden metatags could infringe a trademark even without point-of-sale confusion.
Predicting Ohio law, the Sixth Circuit held that the Uniform Trade Secrets Act does not displace a plain breach-of-contract claim, a reading that restores the statute's savings clause and its promise of uniformity.
How the Supreme Court let Kellogg use the generic name and functional pillow shape of shredded wheat, anchoring the rule that expired patents and generic terms pass into the public domain.
The SEC's largest stand-alone Rule 21F-17(a) settlement turned a routine settlement-release clause into an enforcement event, showing that NDAs are now read for what they silence, not just what they protect.
How the Second Circuit let Toyota keep the LEXUS name and, in Judge Sweet's concurrence, gave trademark law its influential six-factor framework for analyzing dilution by blurring.
The Sixth Circuit affirmed a multimillion-dollar trade-secret verdict against a competitor that hired away a director of research and acquired, with him, a decade of curated broccoli-extract know-how.
The Ninth Circuit's first ruling on the contributory trademark knowledge standard holds that willful blindness requires specific knowledge of infringers, and that counterfeiting needs no stitch-for-stitch copy.
A Texas federal court set aside the FTC's nationwide non-compete ban for lack of rulemaking authority, and the agency ultimately let the vacatur stand, leaving trade-secret law as employers' primary backstop.
How a fight over look-alike generic capsules gave trademark law its enduring 'induces or knowingly supplies' standard for holding suppliers liable for someone else's infringement.
A departing executive who never took a document could still be enjoined. The Seventh Circuit's 1995 ruling let an employer prove misappropriation by showing disclosure was inevitable, and the country has been divided over it ever since.
How the Supreme Court protected a good-faith Louisville druggist against a senior 'Rex' user from Massachusetts, establishing that common-law trademark rights are territorial, not national.
An early decision construing the Defend Trade Secrets Act's ex parte civil seizure remedy denies the order as unnecessary, modeling the preservation-and-TRO path most courts now follow.
A photographer's Miles Davis portrait, a Kat Von D tattoo, and a jury verdict now headed for en banc rehearing that could remake how the Ninth Circuit measures substantial similarity.
Judge Kaplan's influential framework breaks photographic originality into rendition, timing, and composition, clarifying when one photo infringes another's protected choices.
A Coca-Cola chemist's theft of $120 million in BPA-free coating formulas produced one of the rare convictions under the Economic Espionage Act's foreign-government provision, and a Sixth Circuit opinion clarifying what the government must prove.
A half-century after the Supreme Court blessed trade secrets, Kewanee Oil v. Bicron remains the clearest map of when to file and when to keep quiet.
When an author's heirs terminate a publisher's copyright grant, who collects on the records already licensed? The Supreme Court split 5-4 and let the publisher keep its cut.
The Supreme Court held that Google's copying of about 11,500 lines of Java API declaring code to build Android was a fair use as a matter of law, reshaping software copyright.
A Washington federal court holds that the Defend Trade Secrets Act reaches a foreign defendant whenever an act in furtherance occurs in the United States, even an act the defendant did not commit.
The Ninth Circuit held that a stock agency cannot manufacture standing by taking an assignment of bare infringement claims without a real interest in the copyright itself.
The Ninth Circuit threw out a $2.8 million verdict against Katy Perry, holding that the short 'Dark Horse' ostinato consists of commonplace musical elements too unoriginal for copyright protection.
The Third Circuit held that EA's photorealistic use of a college quarterback's avatar in NCAA Football was not transformative enough to defeat his right of publicity, adopting the transformative-use test as the circuit's framework for likeness-in-media disputes.
The Ninth Circuit held that the de minimis exception applies to sound-recording copyrights, clearing Madonna's 'Vogue' of a sampling claim and openly splitting with the Sixth Circuit's Bridgeport rule.
The Federal Circuit held that the terms of an open-source license can be enforceable copyright conditions, not just contract covenants. Violating them can be infringement, unlocking injunctive relief.
The Ninth Circuit held that deliberately imitating a widely known singer's distinctive voice to sell a product is a California tort, even though a voice itself is not copyrightable.
The en banc Ninth Circuit held that authorizing inside the U.S. acts of infringement that occur entirely overseas does not state a claim under the Copyright Act, cabining the law's reach at the water's edge.
Experience Hendrix v. HendrixLicensing.com upheld Washington's post-mortem publicity statute as applied to a New York-domiciled rock legend, exposing how a fractured state-law patchwork now governs the dead.
The Supreme Court held that prevailing copyright defendants and plaintiffs must be treated alike when courts award attorney's fees under Section 505: a discretionary, evenhanded standard.
How California's appellate court used the First Amendment to dismiss Olivia de Havilland's publicity and false-light suit over the 'Feud' docudrama.
The First Circuit held that copyright cannot protect sweepstakes rules where so few ways exist to state them that protecting the words would lock up the idea itself.
Judge Posner held that a writer who only supplied a name and dialogue can be a joint copyright owner of a comic character, even though someone else drew it, when their contributions merge into one work.
The Ninth Circuit held that a game-show robot could appropriate Vanna White's identity, untethering the right of publicity from name and likeness.
By a single vote, the Supreme Court held that taping a show to watch later is fair use and that selling VCRs is not contributory infringement, protecting copying technology for a generation.
The Second Circuit cleared Cablevision's remote DVR by deciding that the customer, not the cable company, makes the copy, and that fleeting buffers are not fixed copies at all.
Judge Wilken's final approval of the $2.8 billion House settlement converts decades of amateurism doctrine into a licensed, revenue-shared market for athlete name, image, and likeness.
The Fifth Circuit held that a broadband provider can be contributorily liable for ignoring 1.3 million piracy notices, then vacated the $46.7 million award over how albums are counted. The Supreme Court vacated that judgment in April 2026 after Cox v. Sony.
The Second Circuit revived right-of-publicity claims by professional models whose photographs were lifted to advertise strip clubs online, holding that a release signed for one purpose is not consent against the world.
How the Second Circuit upheld the DMCA's anti-trafficking ban against a DeCSS publisher, holding that computer code is speech but its functional distribution can still be regulated.
How an 1884 Supreme Court case about a portrait of Oscar Wilde established that photographs can be copyrightable original works authored by the photographer's creative choices.
The Seventh Circuit's Toney decision holds that the Copyright Act does not preempt an Illinois Right of Publicity Act claim, anchoring the rule that a persona is neither fixed nor authored.
How the Second Circuit held that contributing ideas and research to a play does not make you a co-author without a mutual intent to share authorship.
The Ninth Circuit held that Marilyn Monroe's estate, having sworn for forty years that she died a New Yorker to dodge California estate tax, was judicially estopped from claiming California domicile to capture a posthumous right of publicity worth millions.
Major labels accuse the AI music generators Suno and Udio of copying sound recordings to train their models. The pending Boston and New York cases test fair use for AI audio.
Disney and Universal accuse Midjourney of training on and generating their iconic characters. The pending C.D. Cal. case tests whether AI image output infringes famous copyrighted figures.
A Southern District of New York court held that imitating an actress's famous voice (without using her name or likeness) was not unfair competition, defamation, or a Lanham Act violation.
A Northern District of New York court denied a trade-secret injunction where a former employee's new employer plausibly reverse-engineered publicly available parts, and the plaintiff could not prove its specifications were secret or improperly taken.
After more than a decade of litigation, the Second Circuit held that even a famous mark cannot prove dilution by blurring without meaningful similarity and real evidence of association, affirming judgment for a tiny New Hampshire roaster.
When Stiffel's lamp patents were held invalid, the Supreme Court ruled that no state unfair-competition law could stop Sears from copying the unpatented design, establishing that exclusivity flows only from the federal patent bargain.
The Third Circuit held that Section 230 does not immunize platforms from state right-of-publicity claims, splitting from the Ninth Circuit on the law's intellectual-property carve-out.
The Federal Circuit held 'visually negligible' definite because it was anchored to what the normal human eye can perceive, supplying the objective baseline that purely subjective terms lack.
Georgia's Supreme Court held that Dr. King's right of publicity survived his death and was inheritable even though he never licensed his identity for profit, uncoupling descendibility from lifetime commercial exploitation and reshaping what a non-commercial figure's estate can protect.
The Second Circuit held that ASCAP's consent decree forbids music publishers from selectively pulling their performance rights out of the collective for digital services like Pandora.
The Ninth Circuit held that a copyright owner must consider fair use in good faith before sending a DMCA takedown notice, and that failing to do so can expose the sender to liability for misrepresentation under § 512(f).
The Tenth Circuit, in an opinion by then-Judge Gorsuch, upheld a $2.92 million reasonable-royalty award for stolen source code, confirming that a misappropriator can owe royalty damages for mere disclosure, with no proof of commercial use.
A California consultant who sold DuPont's chloride-route titanium-dioxide process to Chinese state firms became the first defendant convicted by a jury under the economic-espionage section of the EEA. The Ninth Circuit affirmed those counts, but reversed two obstruction-related convictions and vacated his sentence.
California's two 2024 digital-replica laws take different routes. One voids consent-by-contract for living performers; the other extends the post-mortem right of publicity to AI replicas of the deceased. Together they reset the rules for Hollywood.
Judge Posner explained why a container design disclosed in a bid (conceded not to be a trade secret and outside the parties' logistics-only nondisclosure agreement) was free for the recipient to use.
The Ninth Circuit became the first court of appeals to declare squarely that trademark plaintiffs no longer enjoy a presumption of irreparable harm. They must prove it, like everyone else seeking an injunction.
A federal court let an IBM executive walk straight to Hewlett-Packard, holding that a doctrine New York entertains in theory fails without particularized secrets, near-identical roles, and proof of bad faith.
The Fourth Circuit held that fallwell.com was neither infringing nor cybersquatting, because likelihood of confusion turns on the whole site and the ACPA targets profit-seeking, not criticism.
The Ninth Circuit held that former NCAA players' publicity claims over an online photo-licensing service were preempted by copyright, because the suit attacked control of the photographs themselves rather than use of the players' identities on merchandise or in ads.
On rehearing, a divided Ninth Circuit held that a clearly labeled list of substitute products is not trademark infringement, narrowing initial-interest confusion for the era of online search.
The Ninth Circuit held that Nike's iconic Michael Jordan 'Jumpman' photograph did not infringe Jacobus Rentmeester's earlier image, because copyright protects a photograph's expression of a pose, not the pose itself.
The Federal Circuit finally confirmed that eBay abolished the presumption of irreparable harm, yet reversed a district court that had used categorical reasoning to deny a competitor's permanent injunction.
The Second Circuit vacated a roughly $285 million unjust-enrichment award, holding that avoided development costs were unavailable because Syntel's only unjust gain was already addressed in computing TriZetto's actual loss.
The Federal Circuit vacated a global FRAND license set in a bench trial, holding that a 'release payment' for past infringement triggered the constitutional right to a jury.
The Supreme Court's unanimous 2000 decision held that a product's design can qualify as protectable trade dress only on proof of secondary meaning, and told courts to classify ambiguous cases as design, drawing the line that *Two Pesos* had left open.
A Utah court granted a DTSA ex parte seizure where the defendants had supplied false information, hidden and moved files, and possessed the technical skill to defeat an ordinary injunction, a rare case clearing the statute's high bar.
New York's high court refused to void an overbroad non-compete outright, instead narrowing it to the clients the employee personally served and articulating the state's modern reasonableness test.
The Ninth Circuit held that a Star Trek-Seuss mashup was infringement, not parody, drawing a hard line between transformation and clever copying.
The Federal Circuit held that the Cuban embargo did not strip a Cuban tobacco entity of its statutory cause of action to cancel General Cigar's COHIBA registrations.
A federal court kept a trade-secret suit against a Chinese competitor in Illinois, finding the defendant had not shown China an available and adequate forum, against the backdrop of the DTSA's reach and a worldwide TRO.
An Eastern District of Virginia bench trial inventoried what reasonable measures look like in practice, then found misappropriation in only two of eighteen alleged disclosures.
The Third Circuit confirmed an arbitration award against a two-decade Sabre employee who launched a rival Chinese company while still on the payroll, including more than a million dollars in head-start damages.
The Second Circuit held that Google's scanning of millions of books to create a searchable index and display brief snippets is a transformative, noninfringing fair use.
The Court held that Congress may extend existing and future copyright terms by 20 years under the Sonny Bono Act without violating the Copyright Clause's 'limited Times' or the First Amendment.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that a trademark defendant asserting descriptive fair use bears no burden to disprove likelihood of confusion, which remains the plaintiff's to prove.
The Seventh Circuit reinstated a jury's trade-secret verdict for a two-man toy startup, holding that economic value and reasonable secrecy measures are fact questions and that an oral confidentiality agreement can suffice.
The Supreme Court held that a patent licensee paying royalties under protest need not breach its license to bring a declaratory-judgment action challenging the patent.
The Seventh Circuit held that a supermarket's tribute ad to Michael Jordan was commercial speech, stripping it of full First Amendment protection and reviving his publicity claims.
The Federal Circuit held that whether a claim element is well-understood, routine, and conventional is a factual question that can defeat summary judgment of ineligibility under Section 101.
The California Supreme Court held that under the UTSA, continued misuse of a trade secret after the initial theft is one continuing claim accruing at the first misappropriation, not a series of fresh claims.
The Supreme Court held that repaired, resold spark plugs may keep the maker's trademark if plainly marked used or reconditioned, and denied an accounting of profits absent fraud.
The Supreme Court held that Coca-Cola's name had come to mean a single product from a single source, and rejected the claim that its history barred trademark relief.
The Supreme Court held that a rubber-curing process is not unpatentable merely because it uses a mathematical formula and a programmed computer to control the cure.
A unanimous Supreme Court rejected the Federal Circuit's rigid Seagate test, restoring district courts' discretion to award up to treble damages under Section 284 for egregious, willful patent infringement.
The Supreme Court held that an authorized sale (anywhere in the world, and despite any post-sale restriction) exhausts a patentee's rights, leaving only contract remedies.
A California appellate court held that Band Hero's exact avatars of No Doubt were literal reproductions, not transformative use, so the band's right-of-publicity claim could proceed.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that method patents are subject to exhaustion and that an authorized sale of components substantially embodying a patent ends the patentee's rights.
The Second Circuit held that Google's sale and recommendation of trademarks as AdWords keyword triggers is a 'use in commerce' under the Lanham Act, reviving the suit.
In Alaska Stock v. Houghton Mifflin (9th Cir. 2014), the court upheld a stock agency's database registrations that did not name every photographer or title, deferring to three decades of Copyright Office practice on registering collections.
A California appellate court voided an employer's sweeping confidentiality provisions as a de facto noncompete that barred a trader from his profession for life.
The Second Circuit held that Jeff Koons's 'String of Puppies' sculpture infringed Art Rogers's photograph and rejected the parody defense because Koons did not target the original work itself.
The Ninth Circuit held that a celebrity's discarded birth name remains part of his identity, reviving claims over an Oldsmobile commercial.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that implementing an abstract idea on a generic computer adds nothing patentable, extending the Mayo framework to software and business methods.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that patent exhaustion does not let a farmer grow successive generations of a patented seed, because planting and harvesting creates new copies rather than merely using a purchased one.
The Federal Circuit upheld an exclusion order against Comcast's set-top boxes, holding the ITC may act even where the inducing conduct is entirely domestic and Comcast itself imported nothing.
The Supreme Court held that a good-faith belief in a patent's invalidity does not negate the intent required for induced infringement, while reaffirming that inducement demands knowledge of infringement.
Computer Associates v. Altai adapted the idea-expression dichotomy to computer programs through its abstraction-filtration-comparison test, filtering out elements dictated by efficiency, external constraints, and the public domain.
The Supreme Court held that the Seventh Amendment guarantees a jury trial on statutory copyright damages (including the amount itself), reshaping how infringement awards are decided.
The en banc Ninth Circuit rejected an actress's claim to copyright in her brief filmed performance, holding that an individual acting contribution does not create a separately ownable work.
In Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org (2020), a divided Supreme Court held that the annotations in Georgia's official annotated code are uncopyrightable government edicts because they are authored by legislators acting as legislators.
A cryptographer and a hardware hacker argued that the DMCA's anti-circumvention rules censor lawful research and tinkering; the D.C. Circuit held that § 1201 regulates conduct and survives the First Amendment.
The Second Circuit holds that Congress has not incorporated the famous-marks doctrine into the Lanham Act, then certifies the state-law question to New York's high court.
The Supreme Court abolished licensee estoppel, holding that federal patent policy lets a licensee stop paying royalties and challenge the validity of the licensed patent.
The Second Circuit held that Jack Kirby's foundational 1958-1963 comics were works made for hire under the 1909 Act's 'instance and expense' test, defeating his children's § 304(c) termination notices.
The Ninth Circuit adopted the Rogers test, protected a pop song that lampooned an American icon, and closed with one of the most quoted lines in trademark law: the parties are advised to chill.
The Supreme Court held that a copyrighted statuette does not lose protection by being mass-produced and incorporated as the base of a utilitarian lamp, laying the groundwork for the useful-articles doctrine.
A soldier who said The Hurt Locker was built on his life lost to the First Amendment, which protects storytellers who transform real people into art on matters of public concern.
The Ninth Circuit held that copying object code to study a program's unprotected functional elements can be fair use, securing reverse engineering as a tool for interoperability and competition.
The Fifth Circuit held that the SUGARBUSTERS service mark, bought from a diabetic-supply store and used for a diet book, was assigned in gross and invalid because the goodwill did not transfer with it.
The Federal Circuit's analogous-use decision held that promotional activity can establish trademark priority before sales, but only on proof that it reached a substantial portion of the relevant consuming public, not merely that the user intended an association.
The Ninth Circuit revived Trader Joe's claims against a Canadian reseller, holding that the Lanham Act's foreign reach is a question on the merits (not federal jurisdiction) and that buying and harming a brand inside the U.S. can supply the needed domestic nexus.
The Ninth Circuit recognized that imitating a celebrity's distinctive voice to imply sponsorship can be a false-endorsement violation of Section 43(a) of the Lanham Act.
The Federal Circuit held that a prenatal test using cell-free fetal DNA was patent-ineligible because it detected a natural phenomenon with conventional techniques, even as judges questioned the result.
The Second Circuit held that libraries' mass digitization of books for full-text search and access for the print-disabled is a transformative, noninfringing fair use.
The Second Circuit held that ReDigi's 'used' digital music marketplace necessarily made unauthorized reproductions, so the first-sale defense, which reaches only distribution, could not save it.
The Eighth Circuit held that a fantasy-sports operator's use of player names and statistics was protected by the First Amendment, overriding the players' right of publicity.
The Federal Circuit reversed a PTAB win for the patentee, holding that a claimed range overlapping the prior art creates a presumption of obviousness that applies in inter partes review just as in court.
The Federal Circuit refused patents on five expressed sequence tags whose only disclosed uses were generic research applications, sharpening the 'specific and substantial' utility standard for the genomics era.
The Federal Circuit held that a slide poster displayed at a scientific meeting can be prior art under §102(b) even though it was never distributed or indexed in any library.
The Third Circuit refused to treat amateurism as a bar to wage claims, adopting an economic-realities test that could make some college athletes employees entitled to pay under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
The Supreme Court upheld Customs' common-control exception for gray-market imports while striking the authorized-use exception, defining when genuine foreign goods can be stopped at the U.S. border under the Tariff Act.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that the 'article of manufacture' for design-patent damages under § 289 can be a single component, not necessarily the entire end product sold to consumers.
The D.C. Circuit held that a foreign broadcaster who directs infringing video-on-demand performances to viewers in the United States commits a domestic violation of the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court held that subsidiary factual findings underlying a claim construction must be reviewed for clear error, narrowing decades of de novo appellate review.
The Supreme Court held that administrative patent judges wielded unconstitutional power and fixed the defect by giving the USPTO Director authority to review their decisions.
A unanimous Supreme Court read the Section 271(e)(1) safe harbor broadly, shielding preclinical experiments on patented compounds whenever there is a reasonable basis to believe they could inform an eventual FDA submission.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that Nike's broad, irrevocable covenant not to sue mooted a competitor's counterclaim attacking the validity of Nike's Air Force 1 trademark.
The Fourth District reversed summary adjudication to hold that California's trade-secret statute does not displace breach-of-contract, fiduciary-duty, conversion, and unfair-competition claims that rest on conduct independent of any misappropriation.
Learned Hand held that a trademark's validity turns on what buyers understand the word to mean. To consumers, "Aspirin" meant the drug itself, not Bayer.
A single in-state sale of two caps to an out-of-state buyer was enough use in commerce to defeat cancellation, as the Federal Circuit rejected a de minimis test for Lanham Act use.
The Supreme Court holds that exporting the unassembled parts of a patented machine for assembly abroad is not 'making' the invention, prompting Congress to rewrite the statute a decade later.
Reversing a $1.2 billion judgment, the Federal Circuit held that a CAR-T patent claiming any antibody binding element failed written description because it disclosed no representative species or common structure for the vast scFv genus.
A 6-3 Supreme Court invoked stare decisis to reaffirm Brulotte's rule barring royalties for using a patent after it expires, leaving any change to Congress.
Judge Posner held that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, as drawn in the pre-1923 stories, are free for anyone to use, rejecting the estate's 'complex character' copyright theory.
A 5-4 Supreme Court preserved assignor estoppel but confined it to cases where an inventor's invalidity attack contradicts a representation made in assigning the patent.
The Supreme Court held that publishers cannot resell freelance articles to electronic databases under the Section 201(c) collective-works privilege without the authors' permission.
A unanimous Supreme Court discarded the rigid Brooks Furniture test, holding that an 'exceptional' case under 35 U.S.C. § 285 is simply one that stands out from the norm.
The Federal Circuit set out the durable standard for joint inventorship and confirmed that misjoinder or nonjoinder is not automatic invalidity, because the patentee must be given a chance to correct under Section 256.
The Supreme Court held that trade secrets are property protected by the Takings Clause, but that the right exists only so long as the holder guards the secret and holds reasonable expectations of confidentiality.
The Supreme Court upheld the USOC's exclusive control of the word "Olympic" against a First Amendment challenge and held the committee is not a government actor.
The en banc Ninth Circuit's decision upholding the 'Stairway to Heaven' verdict, confining old compositions to their deposit copies, and abolishing the inverse ratio rule.
The Ninth Circuit held that intermediate copying of Sony's PlayStation BIOS to reverse engineer a lawful emulator was fair use, protecting interoperability and cementing the Sega v. Accolade rule.
The Federal Circuit vacated a $368 million award, holding that even the smallest salable unit must be apportioned to the patented features and rejecting the Nash Bargaining Solution as a disguised rule of thumb.
California's Supreme Court held that comic-book villains loosely based on musicians Johnny and Edgar Winter were transformative expression protected by the First Amendment.
A 6-3 Supreme Court held that the Lanham Act's bar on registering 'immoral or scandalous' marks is viewpoint discrimination that violates the First Amendment.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that distributing a device with the object of promoting its use to infringe copyright creates liability for the resulting infringement by users.
The Federal Circuit affirmed that decades of unreasonable, unexplained delay in prosecuting continuation applications can render the resulting patents unenforceable.
The Federal Circuit upheld internet-centric claims that were necessarily rooted in computer technology to solve a problem unique to online networks, the first eligible software claims after Alice.
The Supreme Court held that a formula for updating alarm limits is patent-ineligible where the only novelty is the algorithm and the rest is conventional post-solution activity.
A California district court held that an internet access provider is not a direct infringer for automatically copying user postings, seeding the volitional-conduct rule and the later DMCA safe harbors.
The Ninth Circuit held that Napster was liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement because it knew of infringing files and could police its central index but did not.
The Ninth Circuit held that EA's unlicensed use of thousands of former NFL players on Madden's historic teams was central, not incidental, and that Keller foreclosed EA's transformative-use, public-interest, and Rogers defenses.
The Ninth Circuit vacated the wholesale transfer of the billion-dollar Bratz brand to Mattel, holding that an employee-invention clause's reach over mere "ideas" was ambiguous and the equitable remedy grossly overbroad.
The Supreme Court sustained Samuel Morse's telegraph patent but voided his eighth claim to every use of electromagnetism for printing at a distance as too broad and unsupported.
The Tenth Circuit held that Cardtoons' parody baseball cards were protected First Amendment commentary that outweighed the players' union's Oklahoma right of publicity.
The Second Circuit saved Christian Louboutin's red-sole trademark from an aesthetic-functionality death sentence but narrowed it to soles that contrast with the rest of the shoe, leaving YSL's all-red shoe free to walk.
The Federal Circuit held that a self-referential database design was not an abstract idea, establishing that Alice step one is a meaningful filter for claims that improve computer functionality.
The Supreme Court held that inducing patent infringement under § 271(b) requires knowledge of infringement, but that willful blindness to a patent can supply that knowledge.
New York's highest court held that even a video-game character built from a reality star's biography is not actionable when the avatar is not recognizable as her.
The Supreme Court held that when an author dies before the copyright renewal term vests, his heirs' renewal rights defeat a prior grant to make and exploit a derivative work like Rear Window.
The California Supreme Court's 1979 companion to Lugosi denied a descendible right of publicity, but Chief Justice Bird's concurrence on fictionalized portrayals of the dead became enduringly influential.
Judge Learned Hand held that an inventor who commercially exploits an invention in secret beyond the grace period forfeits the right to patent it, forcing a choice between trade-secret protection and the patent monopoly.
The Supreme Court held that combining naturally non-inhibitive strains of nitrogen-fixing bacteria was an unpatentable discovery of a product and phenomenon of nature.
The Supreme Court held that a magazine's scoop of 300 verbatim words from Gerald Ford's unpublished memoir was not fair use, making market harm the most important factor.
The Federal Circuit vacates a genericness refusal but affirms that a highly descriptive domain-name mark failed to prove the heightened acquired distinctiveness it needed under Section 2(f).
The Ninth Circuit held that loading copyrighted software from disk into RAM creates a fixed copy under the Copyright Act, exposing third-party repair technicians to infringement liability.
Justice Holmes held that commercial advertising can be copyrighted and that judges must not sit as arbiters of a work's artistic merit, establishing copyright's low originality threshold.
The Supreme Court held that a method for converting binary-coded decimal numerals into pure binary is an unpatentable abstract idea because a patent would preempt the formula itself.
A California appellate panel voided an employee non-solicitation covenant under section 16600 and openly questioned the survival of Loral v. Moyes after Edwards.
The Federal Circuit rejected any automatic prohibition on injunctions for FRAND-committed patents while affirming that Motorola could not meet the eBay standard for one.
The Eighth Circuit held that proprietary markings and confidentiality agreements were enough to keep aircraft-overhaul documents secret, even though much of their content was publicly available.
When a tire giant rolled out a 'Bigfoot' campaign over a small dealer's prior mark, the Tenth Circuit fashioned a remedy borrowed from the FTC (corrective advertising damages) and capped it at a fraction of the offending ad spend.
The fight over the recipe for Thomas' English Muffins produced a Third Circuit ruling that an employer need not prove disclosure is inevitable, only a substantial threat of trade secret misappropriation.
A unanimous Supreme Court struck down Florida's anti-plug-molding statute, holding that a state may not grant patent-like protection to an unpatented design already disclosed to the public, and explaining why trade-secret law survives the same test.
A California federal court refused to hold as a matter of law that a departing sales manager's LinkedIn contacts and exported customer database were not trade secrets, leaving the question for trial.
The Federal Circuit's golf-mark decision supplies the canonical two-part test for cancellation standing and shows how one DuPont factor can decide a likelihood-of-confusion case.
The Federal Circuit affirmed a permanent injunction against a feature of Microsoft Word, showing how a small patentee can satisfy all four eBay factors against a dominant competitor when the injunction is carefully scoped.
Judge Easterbrook held that a software company's forty-three-page, undifferentiated description of its medical-billing system failed to identify any trade secret with the specificity the law demands.
The Federal Circuit's first major post-Nautilus decision held the phrase 'in an unobtrusive manner that does not distract a user' indefinite, illustrating how purely subjective language fails the reasonable-certainty test.
A California appellate court held that models' statutory right-of-publicity claims under Civil Code § 3344 are not preempted by federal copyright, because a human likeness is not copyrightable even when captured in a copyrighted image.
An Indiana court held that a Rule 65 temporary restraining order can authorize the seizure of a defendant's laptop to preserve trade-secret evidence, sidestepping the DTSA's stringent ex parte seizure provision entirely.
The Fourth Circuit held that 'People Eating Tasty Animals' could not shield peta.org behind the First Amendment, because a domain identical to a mark conveys ownership before any visitor sees the joke.
A Southern District of New York court held that realistically depicting NBA players' tattoos in NBA 2K was non-infringing on three independent grounds: de minimis use, implied license, and fair use.
The Supreme Court's 1992 decision held that inherently distinctive trade dress is protectable under Section 43(a) without proof of secondary meaning, extending to a restaurant's look the same first-day protection long given to coined word marks.
The Ninth Circuit held that Veoh's automated transcoding and playback functions fell within 'storage at the direction of a user,' and that general knowledge of infringement on a video platform does not defeat the DMCA safe harbor.
The Ninth Circuit held that Nancy Sinatra could not stop a tire company from using sound-alike singers on a song it had lawfully licensed, because federal copyright policy preempted her state passing-off claim.
A Tennessee court found Spotify infringed Eminem's compositions by streaming them without mechanical licenses, then barred the claim entirely under equitable estoppel for the publisher's strategic delay.
The Fourth Circuit held that a successful parody can defeat both blurring and tarnishment claims under the revised dilution statute, because a good parody depends on, and reinforces, the very distinctiveness it pokes fun at.
The ITC barred a Chinese chemical maker's imports for trade-secret theft committed in China, and the Federal Circuit and Supreme Court let the exclusion order stand despite a contrary result in Chinese courts.
The Seventh Circuit held that a would-be buyer who received a target's secret designs during acquisition negotiations and then built a competing product had breached a confidential relationship the law implied from the dealings themselves.
A former Motorola engineer caught at O'Hare with stolen telecom secrets was convicted of trade-secret theft but acquitted of economic espionage, illustrating how hard it is to prove intent to benefit a foreign government.
The Third Circuit vacated a baking-supply injunction because the district court never said precisely what the protected trade secrets were, a cautionary tale about identifying the secret before enjoining anyone.
The Federal Circuit dismantled a $48.8 million trade-secret disgorgement award on three fronts at once: who decides it, how to apportion among secrets, and how long the unjust-enrichment clock runs once reverse engineering becomes possible.
Tennessee's 2024 ELVIS Act was the first U.S. law written for AI voice cloning: it made voice an express attribute of Tennessee's right of publicity and reached the tools that clone it. It is a statute, not a court ruling, and a template other states are now copying.
The Ninth Circuit held that a web host that ignores notices and keeps serving counterfeit-selling sites can be liable for contributory trademark infringement, but capped statutory damages at one award per mark, jointly and severally.
The Sixth District extended California's trade-secret displacement doctrine to claims over non-trade-secret data while holding that an end user who runs compiled software does not thereby 'use' the source-code secrets behind it.
The Supreme Court unanimously held that NCAA limits on education-related benefits violate the Sherman Act, and Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence signaled that the broader amateurism model was living on borrowed time.
The Ninth Circuit held that a proviso unambiguously ended an NDA's confidentiality obligations after two years, vacating a $60 million verdict because the jury never heard that defense.
The Federal Circuit held that a later-issued, earlier-expiring patent can serve as a double-patenting reference, anchoring the doctrine to expiration dates in the post-URAA world.
The Supreme Court holds that supplying a single commodity component from the United States cannot trigger §271(f)(1) liability, reading 'substantial portion' as a quantitative measure.
The Supreme Court read the Plant Variety Protection Act's farmer exemption narrowly, holding that a grower may sell saved seed only in the amount needed to replant his own acreage.
The Second Circuit held that appropriation art can be transformative fair use even without commenting on the original, then left five works in doubt.
A New Jersey court held that Elvis Presley's right of publicity descended to his estate and barred impersonator merchandise and confusing marketing, but declined to shut down the live 'Big El Show' itself because the estate never proved an identifiable economic loss from the performance.
The Ninth Circuit recognizes a famous-marks exception to trademark territoriality, allowing a foreign mark to be protected in the United States when a substantial share of the relevant American market knows it.
The Second Circuit held that the law of the country of origin governs copyright ownership while U.S. law governs infringement occurring on American soil.
The Supreme Court replaced three competing circuit tests with a single rule: a false-advertising plaintiff must fall within the Lanham Act's zone of interests and show proximate cause.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that inducing infringement under Section 271(b) requires a predicate act of direct infringement, refusing to extend liability across divided method steps.
The First Circuit held that the Lotus 1-2-3 menu command hierarchy is an uncopyrightable 'method of operation' under Section 102(b), a ruling left standing by an evenly divided Supreme Court.
The First Circuit's 2005 decision built a separate, tougher test for foreign defendants (demanding a substantial effect on U.S. commerce) and refused to let a Japanese-language website carry an American trademark claim across the Pacific.
The Ninth Circuit split the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions in two, holding that § 1201(a) protects access independently of infringement, and that a World of Warcraft cheat maker violated it.
In Star Athletica v. Varsity Brands (2017), the Supreme Court replaced a tangle of separability tests with a single statutory inquiry, holding that surface decorations on cheerleading uniforms can be copyrighted as pictorial works.
The Ninth Circuit let two Cheers actors take their right-of-publicity claim to trial over airport-bar robots evoking their characters.
The Seventh Circuit's ZAZU decision held that token sales and an intent to register cannot establish trademark priority: only genuine market use that links the mark to a source in consumers' minds will do.
The Seventh Circuit held that owners who licensed the EVA'S BRIDAL name to a relative without retaining any authority over how the store was run abandoned the mark through naked licensing.
In Reed Elsevier v. Muchnick (2010), a unanimous Supreme Court held that copyright registration under § 411(a) is a claim-processing precondition, not a limit on federal subject-matter jurisdiction, saving a class settlement that swept in unregistered works.
The Ninth Circuit denied joint-authorship status to a key creative consultant on 'Malcolm X,' holding that significant contribution is not enough without control and a shared intent to be co-authors.
The Federal Circuit held that the ITC cannot bar infringing digital data transmitted electronically across the border, because Section 337 reaches only material things.
In Nichols v. Universal Pictures, Judge Learned Hand articulated the abstractions test for separating unprotectable ideas and stock characters from protectable expression, the most enduring tool in nonliteral copyright analysis.
Polaroid lost its 1961 infringement suit to laches, but Judge Friendly's catalogue of variables for gauging confusion became the most cited multifactor test in American trademark law.
A Southern District of New York court let recording artists pursue § 203 termination of their master recordings but refused to certify a class, holding the work-for-hire defense too individualized to resolve collectively.
A co-inventor of even a single claim becomes a co-owner of the whole patent. The Federal Circuit let that overlooked inventor license the accused infringer and dismantle the case.
The Federal Circuit affirms that CHURRASCOS is generic for restaurant services and that owning a prior registration does not insulate a later application from a genericness refusal.
A federal judge denied the music publishers a preliminary injunction against Anthropic over Claude's reproduction of song lyrics, finding their proposed order overbroad and their claimed harm unproven, even as a guardrails stipulation quietly reshaped the dispute.
The Supreme Court held that Aereo's array of dime-sized antennas publicly performed broadcast television, treating the service as functionally identical to a cable system despite its individualized architecture.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that a generic drugmaker may use the Hatch-Waxman counterclaim to force a brand to correct an overbroad Orange Book use code that was blocking a lawful skinny-label generic.
The Ninth Circuit applied its Batmobile test to deny copyright in 'The Moodsters' and rejected the creator's idea-submission claim against Disney's Inside Out.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit scrapped the separate point-of-novelty test for design-patent infringement and made the prior-art-informed ordinary observer the sole standard.
The Supreme Court held that a confidential commercial sale to a third party can place an invention 'on sale' under the AIA, just as it did under the prior statute.
The Federal Circuit vacated an obviousness judgment because the trial court declared the claims obvious first and only then asked whether objective indicia could rescue them.
The Federal Circuit held that an invention designed to fool consumers does not fail the utility requirement, retiring the long-dormant doctrine that deceptive or immoral inventions are unpatentable.
Why the Sixth Circuit held in 1980 that Elvis Presley's right of publicity died with him and passed into the public domain, an Erie prediction Tennessee would later reject.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit demoted the dictionary and elevated the patent's own specification as the single best guide to claim meaning.
The Supreme Court held that when the Patent Office institutes an inter partes review, it must decide the patentability of every claim the petitioner challenged: all or nothing.
The Supreme Court held that a feature claimed in an expired utility patent is presumptively functional and barred from trade dress protection, and that the availability of alternative designs does not rescue a functional feature.
The Ninth Circuit held that a Hall of Famer's Lanham Act false-endorsement claim over his avatar in Madden NFL was governed by the Rogers artistic-relevance test (and lost) even as a right-of-publicity claim on similar facts survived.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that correlations between drug-metabolite levels and dosing were unpatentable laws of nature, and built the two-step test that would reshape Section 101.
Decades of planning an air-taxi reservation service could not satisfy the Lanham Act's use requirement, because the AIRFLITE service was never actually rendered to the public.
The Ninth Circuit's decision affirming that 'Blurred Lines' infringed Marvin Gaye's 'Got to Give It Up' and the enduring fear that copyright can now protect a song's groove and vibe.
A specification that disclosed a single rapamycin compound could not support claims reaching tens of thousands of structurally diverse molecules, the Federal Circuit held, because finding the active ones required excessive screening.
California's Supreme Court borrowed copyright's transformation idea to decide when celebrity art is protected speech, and held that literal Three Stooges drawings are not.
The Supreme Court held that the equitable defense of laches cannot bar a copyright damages claim filed within the Act's three-year limitations period, a decision that reoriented how delay is policed in infringement remedies.
Ginger Rogers lost her suit over a Fellini film, but the Second Circuit's opinion gave expressive works a durable First Amendment shield against Lanham Act claims that survived for more than three decades.
The Federal Circuit declared the once-ubiquitous 25 percent royalty shortcut a fundamentally flawed tool, inadmissible under Daubert because it never connects to the facts of the case.
Judge Sidney Stein largely denied OpenAI and Microsoft's motions to dismiss, keeping alive the theory that ChatGPT's outputs and the conduct of its users can infringe. That is a sharp contrast with how California courts have treated similar allegations.
The Supreme Court held that federal patent law does not bar a state-law contract requiring perpetual royalties on a keyholder design whose patent application was rejected, a foundational endorsement of the license-instead-of-patent strategy.
The Supreme Court holds that a Trademark Trial and Appeal Board likelihood-of-confusion ruling can bind a federal court in later infringement litigation.
The Ninth Circuit held that a buffet chain's everyday recipes lacked novelty and secrecy-derived value, and that its loosely guarded training manuals were never reasonably protected, marking the outer boundary of what 'qualifies' under the Uniform Trade Secrets Act.
A 1970 Fifth Circuit decision held that aerial photography of a plant under construction was an improper means of acquiring a trade secret, even though the photographers committed no trespass, breached no confidence, and were never shown to have broken any other law.
The Supreme Court upheld Section 514 of the Uruguay Round Agreements Act, holding that Congress may restore copyright to foreign works that had already entered the U.S. public domain.
The Ninth Circuit reversed a $3 million judgment for Dustin Hoffman, holding that a digitally altered photograph in an editorial fashion feature was protected speech, not a commercial appropriation of his likeness.
California's first published decision squarely addressing trade-secret supersession held that the Uniform Trade Secrets Act displaces common-law tort claims resting on the same factual nucleus as the misappropriation theory.
The Seventh Circuit reversed summary judgment to hold that whether a trade-secret owner took 'reasonable' precautions is almost always a jury question turning on the balance of costs and benefits.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that a trademark plaintiff need not prove willful infringement as a precondition to recovering the infringer's profits under Section 35(a), reshaping the calculus of every infringement demand letter.
The Federal Circuit held that the International Trade Commission may bar imports based on trade-secret misappropriation occurring entirely in China, opening the ITC as a forum for cross-border theft.
The largest trade-secret award of its era measured the benefit Kolon gained from stolen Kevlar know-how, then collapsed because the jury never heard the evidence that might have shown the secrets were not secret at all.
Long before the right of publicity protected a voice, the First Circuit held that imitating a famous comedian's distinctive vocal style to sell a product could state a claim for unfair competition.
The earliest civil seizure order under the Defend Trade Secrets Act issued only after a temporary restraining order failed, modeling seizure as the remedy of last resort rather than first resort.
The Supreme Court discarded the Federal Circuit's forgiving 'insolubly ambiguous' test and replaced it with a public-notice standard that asks whether a patent claim informs skilled artisans of its scope with reasonable certainty.
The Second Circuit reversed a Goldman Sachs programmer's criminal conviction because the company's high-frequency trading code was not a product 'produced for or placed in' commerce, exposing a gap Congress closed within months.
The 1976 Second Circuit decision that sorted every word mark into fanciful, arbitrary, suggestive, descriptive, or generic (and cost Abercrombie its oldest 'Safari' registration and its whole infringement case) still governs how courts measure distinctiveness today.
A District of Massachusetts judge enjoined four former employees who walked to Nvidia after three of them copied AMD files to personal drives, one of them more than a million, holding that improper acquisition, not proven use, supports a trade-secret injunction.
In the 5Pointz appeal, the Second Circuit affirmed a $6.75 million award and held that even temporary aerosol art can attain 'recognized stature' protected against willful destruction under the Visual Artists Rights Act.
A New York federal court refused to enjoin a departing internet executive and warned that inevitable disclosure should be invoked only in the rarest of cases, building the doctrine's most influential set of brakes.
The Supreme Court refused to treat injunctive relief as an automatic consequence of patent infringement, restoring the traditional four-factor equity test and reshaping patent litigation for a generation.
The California Supreme Court held that Business and Professions Code section 16600 voids employee non-competes even when narrowly drawn, rejecting the Ninth Circuit's narrow-restraint gloss.
After four dismissals, the Third Circuit revived a microsphere drug-development trade-secret suit and gave the broadest appellate definition yet of what it means to 'use' a trade secret.
Decided weeks after the ACPA became law, the Second Circuit's sportys.com ruling supplied the template for how courts would read bad-faith intent, distinctiveness, and a brand-new statute applied to conduct that predated it.
The Ninth Circuit let a Big Brother contestant's putative class action over the Reface deepfake app proceed, rejecting both a copyright-preemption defense and a transformative-use shield at the pleading stage.
How the D.C. Circuit vacated the Copyright Royalty Board's Phonorecords III streaming mechanical rate hike for inadequate notice and unexplained reasoning, and what the remand meant for songwriters.
The Supreme Court held that the original Federal Trademark Dilution Act required proof of actual dilution rather than a mere likelihood of it. That reading was so demanding that Congress rewrote the statute three years later.
The Second Circuit held that both actual and 'red flag' knowledge under the DMCA must point to specific, identifiable infringements, but revived Viacom's case by reading willful blindness and 'right and ability to control' back into the statute.
A federal court let visual artists' direct and induced copyright claims against AI image generators proceed on the theory that protected works may persist inside the model itself, a holding that reframes how courts think about training data.
In Fourth Estate v. Wall-Street.com (2019), a unanimous Supreme Court held that a copyright owner cannot sue for infringement until the Register of Copyrights has acted on the application, not merely received it.
On materially identical facts to Hart, the Ninth Circuit held that EA's photorealistic depiction of college football players in NCAA Football flunked California's transformative-use test and enjoyed no First Amendment shield.
A 1979 dispute over Slickcraft and Sleekcraft boats gave the Ninth Circuit its enduring eight-factor framework for likelihood of confusion, and a template courts still run today.
Baker v. Selden held that copyright in a book explaining a bookkeeping system protects the explanation, not the system itself, founding the idea-expression dichotomy later codified at 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).
The Ninth Circuit held that a trademark owner who licensed its Leonardo Da Vinci wine mark without meaningful quality control abandoned the mark, even though the licensee made well-regarded wine.
How the Sixth Circuit's Bridgeport Music v. Dimension Films created a near-absolute rule against unlicensed sampling of sound recordings, and why the Ninth Circuit later refused to follow it.
The Supreme Court's unanimous 1989 ruling rejected control-based shortcuts and held that common-law agency principles decide whether a creator is an employee or an independent contractor for work-made-for-hire purposes.
The Federal Circuit holds that advertising a service you have not yet performed cannot support a use-based service-mark registration, voiding the PLAYDOM mark ab initio.
The Federal Circuit held that a patentee cannot base a royalty on the price of a whole laptop when the invention covers only an optical-drive feature, recasting the entire market value rule as a demand-driven exception.
The Ninth Circuit affirmed the first judge-set RAND rate for standard-essential patents and a jury's $14.5 million breach-of-contract verdict against the patent holder.
The Ninth Circuit held that NCAA rules barring athletes from sharing in the commercial use of their own names, images, and likenesses violated antitrust law, but capped the remedy at the cost of attendance.
A Southern District of California ruling held that a co-author of 'Y.M.C.A.' who separately granted away his share could terminate that grant alone, without his co-writers' consent.
The Supreme Court held that the Bayh-Dole Act does not automatically vest patent rights in a federally funded university. Title still begins with the inventor, and a stray 'do hereby assign' can send it elsewhere.
Sitting en banc, the Federal Circuit held that the ITC may bar imports used to induce infringement of a method claim performed only after the goods cross the border.
The Second Circuit held that an online marketplace is contributorily liable for counterfeit sales only when it knows of specific infringing listings, not because counterfeiting is rampant on its platform generally.
The Federal Circuit held that a disclosing party who ignored its NDA's written-designation protocol lost trade-secret protection at the moment of disclosure.
New York's highest court held that a video-game avatar can be a 'portrait' under the right of publicity, but only if the public can actually recognize the plaintiff in it.
The Supreme Court holds that supplying a master disk of software from the United States, then copying it abroad, does not 'supply' the patented invention's components under §271(f).
When a TV station aired a human cannonball's entire fifteen-second performance, the Supreme Court held the First Amendment does not immunize broadcasting a performer's complete act.
The Supreme Court rejected hedging as an unpatentable abstract idea while refusing to make the machine-or-transformation test the exclusive gatekeeper for process patents.
The Supreme Court held that a novel process for making a chemical with no known use fails the utility requirement, planting the doctrinal seed of 'substantial' utility that still governs the chemical and biotech arts.
How the Supreme Court rescued 2 Live Crew's send-up of 'Oh, Pretty Woman' and rewrote the four-factor fair-use test around transformation.
The Sixth Circuit held that a celebrity's signature catchphrase can be appropriated even when his name and likeness are never used.
The Federal Circuit refused to let a copyright owner use § 1201 as a tool to lock out an aftermarket competitor, holding that anti-circumvention liability requires a nexus to actual copyright infringement.
The Supreme Court held that 'origin of goods' in the Lanham Act means the producer of the tangible product sold, not the author of the ideas it embodies, sharply narrowing reverse passing off.
The Second Circuit's foundational concurrent-use decision held that a federal registrant cannot enjoin a good-faith remote junior user until it is likely to expand into that user's trading area, a rule that still shapes every trademark clearance opinion.
The Ninth Circuit held that the Batmobile is a copyrightable character, building a three-part test that now governs character protection for film and television.
The Second Circuit first upheld, then withdrew, an exclusive licensee's power to enforce Elvis Presley's posthumous identity: a whiplash that exposed how fragile a celebrity-estate license is when the underlying right depends on an unsettled state law.
In Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service (1991), the Supreme Court held that a garden-variety white-pages directory lacked the 'modicum of creativity' the Constitution requires, burying the 'sweat of the brow' doctrine for good.
The Supreme Court rejected an absolute bar on equivalents after a narrowing amendment, replacing it with a rebuttable presumption that still governs the doctrine of equivalents today.
In the first design-patent case it ever heard, the Supreme Court rejected an expert-eye comparison and adopted the ordinary-observer test that still governs infringement more than 150 years later.
The Federal Circuit erased the largest patent verdict in U.S. history, holding that a functional nucleoside genus spanning billions of candidate molecules was neither enabled nor adequately described.
The Federal Circuit reset the bar for fraud on the Trademark Office, holding that a registration falls only on clear and convincing proof of a subjective intent to deceive.
The Supreme Court held that ordinary utility patents are available for plants, and that neither the Plant Patent Act nor the Plant Variety Protection Act is the exclusive route to protecting a new variety.
On the second trip to the Supreme Court, Kirtsaeng resolved how district courts should weigh a losing party's litigating position when awarding attorneys' fees under § 505 of the Copyright Act.
The Supreme Court read 'lawfully made under this title' geographically neutral, holding that § 109's first-sale doctrine exhausts the distribution right in copies manufactured abroad.
The Supreme Court replaced the Federal Circuit's mechanical teaching-suggestion-motivation test with a flexible, common-sense obviousness inquiry that still governs every Section 103 dispute today.
How the California Supreme Court held in 1979 that the right of publicity is personal, dies with its owner, and is not descendible to heirs, prompting the statute that overturned it.
The Supreme Court held that construing a patent claim is a question for the judge, not the jury, reshaping how every patent case is tried.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that trademarks are private speech and that the disparagement clause was viewpoint discrimination the First Amendment forbids, even when the speaker is reclaiming a slur.
The Supreme Court held that inter partes review does not violate Article III or the Seventh Amendment because a patent is a public right the agency may reconsider.
The Ninth Circuit's December 2024 decision holds that software built to interoperate with a copyrighted program is not a derivative work without 'something more': actual copying of protected expression.
The Federal Circuit holds that use of a mark abroad creates no priority in the United States, and that knowledge of a foreign mark does not by itself defeat good-faith domestic adoption.
The Supreme Court replaced the Federal Circuit's vague 'substantially complete' standard with a two-part on-sale-bar test that can start the clock before a prototype ever exists.
A unanimous Supreme Court held that a single color can serve as a trademark once it acquires secondary meaning, while making functionality the gatekeeper that keeps color from becoming a competitive chokehold.
The Supreme Court's first reading of the biosimilars statute held that the BPCIA's elaborate pre-litigation information exchange cannot be forced by federal injunction, and that a biosimilar applicant may give its marketing notice before the FDA licenses the product.
The 1952 decision that first let an American trademark owner reach a U.S. citizen's infringing conduct abroad, and seeded seven decades of doctrinal fights over the foreign reach of the Lanham Act.
The en banc Federal Circuit rebuilt the inequitable-conduct doctrine around but-for materiality and specific intent to deceive, narrowing the 'plague' of unenforceability defenses.
