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,"
Lego A/S, Lego Systems, Inc., and Lego Juris A/S first brought claims against Zuru Inc. in 2019, alleging that Zuru's "First-Generation" toy figurines infringed on the copyright and trademark rights of Lego's Minifigure. The U.S. District Court for the District of Connecticut granted Lego's motion for a preliminary injunction, which enjoined Zuru from manufacturing or selling the infringing First-Generation figurines and "any figurine or image that is substantially similar to the Minifigure Copyrights or likely to be confused with the Minifigure Trademarks."
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
Although Alexi has not yet formally responded to the lawsuit, its founder and CEO Mark Doble told me yesterday afternoon that he denies any wrongdoing and that he believes the lawsuit is based on a misunderstanding of the original licensing agreement that came to light during Clio's recent closing of its purchase of vLex, which had merged with Fastcase in 2023.
Applying precedent from both the U.S. Supreme Court and the Federal Circuit's predecessor, the Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA), the appellate court found that Seagen's disclosure on the original patent application claiming its antibody-drug conjugate cancer treatment was too broad to give the later-filed patent-at-issue the original application's priority date, and also required undue experimentation to discover effective drug combinations.
Some justices were skeptical of arguments that ISPs should have no legal obligation under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to terminate an account when a user's IP address has been repeatedly flagged for downloading pirated music. But justices also seemed hesitant to rule in favor of record labels, with some of the debate focusing on how ISPs should handle large accounts like universities where there could be tens of thousands of users.
In May 2025, President Trump terminated Copyright Register Shira Perlmutter from office, one day after she released a report concluding that in some situations AI training on copyrighted works scraped from the internet does not qualify as fair use. Most recently, the Trump Administration has asked the Supreme Court to vacate that injunction in Blanche v. Perlmutter, No. 25A478,
