Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

The new lawsuit goes farther by accusing Google of continuing to "wield its monopoly to coerce PMC into permitting Google to republish PMC's content in AI Overviews" and to use that content "for training and grounding its AI models." Google spokesperson José Castañeda said in a statement that AI Overviews make Google search "more helpful" and create "new opportunities for content to be discovered."

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the European Union Intellectual Property Office announces that it will host its first two-day Copyright Conference in November; the D.C. Circuit finds that Shira Perlmutter showed a likelihood of irreparable harm in granting injunctive relief allowing her to temporarily resume her role as Register of Copyrights; Novartis becomes the latest pharmaceutical company to lose constitutional challenges to the IRA Drug Price Negotiation

The Yuga Labs v. Ryder Ripps case is shaking up NFTs and trademarks.

Federal Circuit has denied this pair of related mandamus actions. In both cases, the patentee VirtaMove challenged venue transfer orders moving its patent infringement suits from the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California. As I discuss below, the non-precedential decisions have some interesting jurisdictional tension with recent Fifth Circuit law. VirtaMove is a small Canadian software company holding patents on secure application containerization technology.

Chatbots consume and regurgitate information from across the web, but they lack a standardized business model to compensate sources. That means those sources could one day dry up, leaving less information for the always-hungry AI, weakening its output. Enter the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, a new tech-based licensing solution for the "AI-first internet," as RSL puts it. It's backed by Reddit, Yahoo!, Ziff Davis (PCMag's parent company), People, Medium, WikiHow, Quora, Adweek, and more.

In a significant victory for software patent applicants, the Federal Circuit reversed the a PTAB rejection of computer system claims in In re McFadden, 2024-2107 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 5, 2025). One problem with the decision is its non-precedential status - even though it clearly breaks new ground. The case offers another example of the potential power of 112(f) means-plus-function claims.

Evan Solomon's office stated he plans to address copyright within Canada's broader AI regulatory approach, focusing on protecting cultural sovereignty and creator involvement.

Ryan "Homebrew Homie" Daly had run Modded Hardware, a site that sold modded Switches able to install homebrew or pirated versions of Switch games, and sold the tools with which others could do the same. Nintendo also claimed the site would return Switches with pirated games pre-installed. Back in March 2024, Nintendo threatened to sue Daly over the site, and the two parties agreed that Daly would stop his naughty behavior and the whole thing would go away.

This week, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart posted another round of Director Discretionary Denial decisions to the PTAB Decisions page, almost all of which denied institution to America Invents Acts (AIA) patent validity trials. Stewart's recent rulings generally confirm the trend so far that a patent owner's settled expectations with respect to patents that have been in force for six years or more hold significant weight, although in two cases this trend was bucked.

The Federal Circuit is now considering a rehearing petition challenging the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Ingenico Inc. v. IOENGINE, LLC, 136 F.4th 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2025), which narrowed the scope of Inter Partes Review (IPR) estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2). Under the statute - an IPR petitioner is estopped from later re-challenging a patent's validity based upon grounds that could have been raised in the IPR:

The lawsuit adds that it is in clear contravention of the general principle of good faith, and of the rules on fair competition and commercial ethics as there is a clear interest in commercial exploitation on the part of the defendant to take advantage of the fame of our client by obtaining a trademark registration that evidently seeks to be related to Pedro Pascal for profit, and on the basis of distracting consumers toward an erroneous commercial origin.

"Yesterday, Oracle filed a motion to dismiss in response to Deno's petition to cancel its 'JavaScript' trademark," Deno Land CEO Dahl said. "But instead of addressing the real issue-that JavaScript is an open standard with multiple independent implementations-Oracle is trying to stall the process and sidestep accountability."

The dramatic ending of Ridley Scott's 1991 crime drama, Thelma & Louise, is oft cited as an analogy for the thin line between patent claims being narrow enough to withstand validity challenges but broad enough to maintain infringement value. This tension frames a dance between parties throughout litigation in large part because claim terms are generally not written in ordinary English and need to be translated.

Misshapen eyes and hands with too many fingers once made AI-generated art easy to spot. Now, as the technology advances, it's becoming harder to tell human work from machine-made creations. With some fearing the replacement of human creatives, AI-generated art has plenty of detractors. "Algorithm aversion," the bias against AI-created work, seems to only be growing, and just 20% of U.S. adults think AI will have a positive impact on arts and entertainment.

It became the inescapable soundtrack of the summer: the uplifting melody of Jess Glynne's 2015 dance-pop hit "Hold My Hand," followed by a chirpy voice declaring that nothing beats a Jet2 holiday. Over the last few months, the British travel agency's advertisement has become a viral TikTok sound, serving as the ironic backdrop for millions of things-gone-terribly-wrong style disaster videos.