Mark Zuckerberg walked into court to defend Instagram from accusations it addicts children. But it was his entourage that drew the attention of the judge. At least two people flanking the Meta CEO on Wednesday wore Meta Ray-Ban smart glasses-AI-equipped eyewear that can record video. Judge Carolyn Kuhl immediately issued a warning. "If you have done that, you must delete that, or you will be held in contempt of the court," she said, according to CNBC. "This is very serious."
Justice Clarence Thomas stated that a provider is not liable 'for merely providing a service to the general public with knowledge that it will be used by some to infringe copyrights.' Liability arises only if the provider intended or actively encouraged the infringement.
Dr. Stephen Thaler, who has been fighting to have his AI machines recognized as both inventors and creators on several fronts for the last few years, has petitioned for rehearing of his case in Thaler v. Perlmutter by the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which in March affirmed the denial of a copyright application filed by one of Thaler's generative AI systems.
Applied Predictive Technologies, Inc. v. MarketDial, Inc., No. 24-1751 (Fed. Cir. Jan. 28, 2026) (nonprecedential). This is a reality of trade secret litigation today - plaintiffs must explain the bounds of their alleged trade secrets both with clarity and supporting evidence showing that the specific information derives independent economic value from not being generally known or readily ascertainable by proper means.
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.'
For those in the patent law world who may have been hiding under a rock, we have been flooded recently with lower court rulings on patent-eligibility under 35 U.S.C. § 101 after Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International. Like a tsunami, these lower court rulings are uniformly sweeping away any patent in its wake as being directed to merely an "abstract idea" that doesn't provide "something more."