Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

As it turns out, one of the billionaire's key legal strategists isn't just an attorney but a professionally trained - and currently practicing - clown. We wish we were kidding. But new reporting by Business Insider tells the tale of Jaymie Parkkinen, an intellectual property lawyer representing Musk by day while working as an actual clown by night.

The USPTO issued ~325,800 utility patents in calendar year 2025, a figure virtually unchanged from the ~325,600 issued in 2024. This stability marks another year in what has become a post-pandemic plateau for utility patent issuances, with annual totals hovering around this mark since 2021. The days of dramatic year-over-year growth appear to be behind us, at least for now. Over the past two years, allowance rates have also remained virtually unchanged.

SC Johnson's primary noninfringement argument was that its products do not include a "spout." Before the district court, both Zip Top and SC Johnson agreed that the spout claim element should be construed as a "distinct feature that directs liquid from and facilitates the pouring of fluid from a container." The dispute on appeal arose from an additional limitation the district court imposed, finding that "the zipper members are not the spout or part of it; rather, the spout is a separate feature."

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,"