Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

"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."

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.'

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.

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.

Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.

This week on IPWatchdog Unleashed, I speak with Todd Walters, who is Chair of the Patent Office Litigation practice group at Buchanan. We explore the current state of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) practice and the growing tension among stakeholders as policy changes continue to reshape post-grant proceedings. We reflect on the intensity of opinion from patent owners and petitioners and discuss the high financial stakes and strategic importance of America Invents Act (AIA) proceedings.

Autodesk first introduced Flow in 2022 as a cloud-based platform for filmmakers and other creators. It has since rolled out products under the Flow umbrella, including Flow Studio, which uses AI to transform live-action footage into 3D scenes. After Google launched its AI-powered Flow app in May 2025, Autodesk claims it asked the tech giant to stop using the "Flow" name. Google allegedly responded by saying it would market the product as "Google Flow - rather than just "Flow."

A few years ago, I put together what I felt was a truly innovative concept, which I presented in a conference poster at an international meeting in my field. After the presentation, I spoke to another early-career scientist about my work and how it might apply to their findings. Two years later, they scooped me by publishing a preprint paper that presented my idea, with many of the same verbal formulations and an identical flow of ideas, without any acknowledgement or attribution to my work.

Yelp hosts millions of reviews written by internet users about local businesses. Most reviews are positive, but over the years, some businesses have tried to pressure Yelp to remove negative reviews, including through legal threats. Since its founding more than two decades ago, Yelp has fought major legal battles to defend reviewers' rights and preserve the legal protections that allow consumers to share honest feedback online. Aaron Schur is General Counsel at Yelp.

Market forces such as rising attorney salaries, persistent inflation, and unrelenting demand in premium practices are giving firms the confidence to push hourly rates beyond historical norms.

On February 2, 2026, U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania Judge Joshua D. Wolson, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware, made several key summary judgment rulings in advance of trial in Arbutus Biopharma Corporation and Genevant Sciences GmbH (collectively "Arbutus") v. Moderna, Inc. and ModernaTx, Inc. (collectively " Moderna "), No. 1:22-cv-00252 (D. Del.).

Johnson and I discuss obviousness determinations built on excessive combinations of prior art, warning that such analyses blur the line between legitimate hindsight reconstruction and genuine innovation assessment. We also highlight a systemic blind spot: nuisance "ankle-biter" assertions that exploit litigation economics while largely evading PTAB scrutiny. These cases have driven much of the political backlash against patents while remaining functionally untouched by the post-grant review process.