Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

On appeal here, the Federal Circuit has vacated and remanded, holding the district court erred by implicitly construing a disputed claim term against the patentee without first providing an opportunity to be heard on claim construction. Although pleading standards have shifted against patentees in recent years, this case is an important reminder that even legal questions require procedural fairness. Although claim construction has been (almost entirely) a question of law for the court since Markman, that designation does not bypass ordinary due process requirements.

David Drake, also known as Dave the Potter, is perhaps America's finest ceramicist and one of the earliest known African American poets, but until now, you could argue that he was not truly an artist. Born into slavery around 1801 in South Carolina, Drake created monumental stoneware jars combining structural mastery with artistic beauty. Today, they are celebrated as among the most important achievements in American ceramics.

Google has filed a lawsuit to protect its search results, targeting a firm called SerpApi that has turned Google's 10 blue links into a business. According to Google, SerpApi ignores established law and Google's terms to scrape and resell its search engine results pages (SERPs). This is not the first action against SerpApi, but Google's decision to go after a scraper could signal a new, more aggressive stance on protecting its search data.

For sports fans, certain moments are etched in memory, like Sid Bream sliding into home to clinch the pennant or Kelee Ringo's interception to seal a national championship. Even celebratory dances, like Ickey Woods' "Ickey Shuffle," become part of the sport's cultural legacy. These are sequences of planned and unplanned movements, which leads us to ask a question concerning intellectual property law: Can a coach's football play be copyrighted?

These sorely needed and common-sense reforms are long overdue and are a first step in bringing so many artists back into the very copyright system that is designed to support their efforts in the creative economy.

The Federal Circuit's first decision in the long-running C.R. Bard v. AngioDynamics litigation had held that the informational content conveyed by radiographic markers on vascular access ports constitutes printed matter not entitled to patentable weight, but that the structural requirement of a radiographically discernible marker could still distinguish the claims from prior art. C R Bard Inc. v. AngioDynamics, Inc., 979 F.3d 1372 (Fed. Cir. 2020).

MSN Pharmaceuticals, Inc. subsequently filed a petition for certiorari to the Supreme Court in August of this year, arguing that there is "doctrinal chaos" surrounding the topic of after-arising technology in the context of patent infringement suits. While some Federal Circuit decisions have held "that when a patentee secures a claim construction that ensnares, as infringing, an accused device that features after-arising technology, the patentee risks invalidating its own patent on written-description and enablement grounds,"

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Monday affirmed a district court's summary judgment of non-infringement and judgment as a matter of law (JMOL) in Shopify Inc. v. Express Mobile, Inc., confirming the rejection of a $40 million jury verdict against Shopify. Shopify filed a declaratory judgment action in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, seeking a declaration of noninfringement of the claims