Five contractors who worked on various OpenAI projects told Business Insider that Handshake suspended their accounts without warning between the end of December and January, and four of those contractors were not paid for their work. The workers said they went to log in to work and learned their accounts had been suspended.
The CAFC affirmed as to anticipation but reversed as to obviousness, holding that the Board relied on the wrong legal standard in finding no motivation to combine. The court emphasized that KSR v. Teleflex explicitly eschews such a rigid approach to obviousness, indicating the PTAB failed to properly apply flexible, common-sense reasoning when evaluating whether combining prior art references would have been obvious to one skilled in the art.
Shelton rejects the romanticized notion of invention as unconstrained creativity. He explains that he is not a fan of "blue sky" brainstorming sessions detached from operational constraints. In his view, unconstrained ideation often produces shallow ideas that collapse under real-world scrutiny. Instead, he deliberately over-constrains the problem. Technical constraints. Regulatory constraints. Cost constraints. Operational bottlenecks. Competitive barriers. Existing prior art. All of it goes into the box.
For patents to be born strong, and the public to have confidence that they are, we must ensure strict adherence to USPTO's ethical standards and avoid (real or apparent) conflicts of interest.
The legal profession rewards endurance, precision and control. It also quietly normalizes stress, isolation and overextension. For patent practitioners and other IP lawyers, the pressures are uniquely acute: compressed prosecution deadlines, high-stakes litigation exposure, often unrealistic client-driven budget constraints, regulatory whiplash at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and increasingly complex technologies layered with global filing and prosecution strategy.
When the cost of importing from overseas skyrocketed into the stratosphere, we decided to sue. We have a strong sense of community, the legacy of being a multigenerational business, but also as a mission-driven business, we exist to help kids get a great start in life, and you're fueled by your sense of meaning and purpose in what you do.
Lost International argued that while the album itself might be expressive, putting the word 'Mayhem' on t-shirts and hoodies shifted the use from artistic expression to source identification. The court rejected this 'disaggregation,' citing precedent from Twentieth Century Fox v. Empire Distribution, which extends First Amendment protection to auxiliary, revenue-generating promotional activities—including merchandise.
The Supreme Court ruled Feb. 20 that Trump's sweeping tariffs on most countries in the world were illegal, clearing the way for the importers who paid them to seek refunds. The government had collected more than $130 billion from the tariffs by mid-December, and could ultimately be on the hook for refunds worth $175 billion, according to calculations by the Penn Wharton Budget Model.
The U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC)-an agency with the extraordinary power to block imports and, in turn, influence the direction of American technology policy-has drifted out of that balance. To align with the Trump Administration's intellectual property priorities and pro-investment agenda, the ITC is in urgent need of reform.
The Ninth Circuit's two-part substantial similarity test works by evaluating whether works share similarities that would be apparent to ordinary observers and whether those similarities stem from protected expression rather than unprotected elements like ideas or facts.
"Google is the largest scraper in the world," the company said in a blog post on Friday. "Google's entire business began with a web crawler that visited every publicly accessible page on the internet, copied the content, indexed it, and served it back to users. It did this without distinguishing between copyrighted and non-copyrighted material, and it did this without asking permission. Now Google is in federal court claiming that our scraping is illegal."
Harrity & Harrity is looking for experienced patent attorneys and agents who want a smarter way to practice law. Our practice is built around streamlined workflows, custom AI and automation tools, and a data-driven approach that keeps the focus where it belongs: on quality, strategy, and client service-not busywork or billable-hour math. You'll work on high-value patent portfolios for top-tier technology companies while enjoying true flexibility, strong support, and meaningful autonomy.
U.S. Patent No. 9,491,542 is titled "Automatic Sound Pass-Through Method and System for Earphones" and was challenged by Samsung via inter partes review (IPR) after ST1 sued Samsung for infringement. Samsung argued that claims 1-10 and 13- 20 of the patent were invalid due to obviousness based on three prior art references: Rosenberg, Ichimura and Visser. The PTAB ultimately found all of the challenged claims obvious over combinations of the prior art, but also found unchallenged claims 11 and 12 unpatentable without explanation.
The letter sent Thursday by Tillis and Schiff requested answers from Wood about why over one-third of the participants on the Restatement project resigned.
"The narrative that implementers are somehow losing sleep over not being able to determine the patents they need to license, before they start infringing, is simply not credible."
The Copyright Claims Board estimated that 'as much as three-quarters of its time is spent on the initial review of claims and amended claims and writing noncompliance orders explaining claim deficiencies,' according to the report. The U.S. Copyright Office on Friday released its report pursuant to the Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement (CASE) Act, finding that the Copyright Claims Board (CCB) is largely successful but that there is 'room for improvement in various respects.'
In 2014, rule changes established by the International Skating Union (ISU) and taking effect after the Sochi Winter Olympics allowed figure skaters to perform their routines to background music containing sung vocals, taking the sport out of the realm of classical music and creating opportunities to use contemporary music with lyrics. In Milan Cortina, several figure skaters performing their routine without any music clearance issues for months suddenly faced legal issues leading up to the Games.
Nintendo's fired off a new volley of legal notices against the Switch emulation scene. Close to a dozen GitHub pages were hit with DMCA takedown requests over the weekend. However, while several of the Nintendo Switch GitHub pages have given in to Nintendo's demands, the development team behind the Eden emulator has boldly refused. Instead, they proceed with publishing a new v0.2.0 build of the Eden Switch emulator on GitHub just days later.
No, Disney did not release footage of a never-before-seen fight sequence between Marvel's Wolverine and Thanos (spoiler: Thanos won). That clip, which amassed over 142,000 views on X over 48 hours, was created using Seedance 2.0, an AI video generation model that ByteDance debuted last week. The tool created a buzz on social media, where one user made a hyperrealistic AI video of Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt fighting over Jeffrey Epstein.
As the AI revolution accelerates and continues to reshape traditional business models, it has triggered a cascade of new legal, regulatory and policy challenges. At the forefront of these emerging issues are a growing number of high-stakes legal battles between content creators and major Generative AI (GenAI) companies behind large language models (LLMs). This article examines key legal themes and critical questions arising from recent developments at the intersection of AI and Copyright law.
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In an ideal world, issued patents would not contain errors. In reality, patent drafting is tedious and time-consuming work and perfection is not an attainable goal. The patent industry seems to be steadily getting better, though. In a recent study, we uncovered an 11.24% decrease in errors per patent over the past four years. We observed this decrease by reviewing every patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 2020 - nearly 1.4 million patents.
This week in Other Barks & Bites, IPWatchdog's IP news roundup: the House of Representatives passes drug patent legislation, while antitrust legislation targeting patent-related activities is introduced into the Senate and the Trump administration mandates pricing information for pharmaceutical ads; the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) issues a pair of precedential decisions on cases with multiple petitions; the USPTO issues marijuana-related trademark guidelines and a notice on modifying patent term adjustment practices;
However, alongside these tangible indicators sits another layer of value, one that does not always surface cleanly in financial statements and may even remain invisible if it is not properly understood or articulated: Put simply, intangible assets are the non-physical elements a company has built that enable it to generate revenue, scale efficiently, or defend its market position. In technology companies, this typically includes proprietary software, intellectual property, datasets, customer relationships, brand equity, and internal systems or processes.
