Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

excluded Rex's damages expert Douglas Kidder from testifying about the key comparable license in the case-a $10 million settlement agreement between Rex and Covidien that covered not only the '650 patent at issue, but also a related patent that had been the subject of a lawsuit (the '892 patent), eight other U.S. patents, seven U.S. patent applications, and nineteen foreign patents or applications. The district court found that Kidder had failed to adequately apportion the license payment among all these patents, rendering his methodology unreliable.

The representative claims recite shower rings with specific design features: a slit extending through the ring to an opening, and in some claims, a "projecting edge" that extends from the ring's outer circumference. The accused products, manufactured by Marquis and sold by Kartri under the "Ezy-Hang" brand, featured rings with flat upper edges similar to Fig 21 above -a design feature that became the central battleground for determining infringement.

Congress enacted the CFAA in 1986 as a criminal law statute in response to the nascent issue of computer "hacking." 18 U.S.C. § 1030. The private cause of action was added a decade later. The Act prohibits unauthorized access or access that exceeds authorized access to computers. The CFAA defines "exceeds authorized access" as accessing "a computer with authorization and [using] such access to obtain . . . information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled to obtain," while leaving "unauthorized access" undefined.

As the first copyright cases concerning AI reach appeals courts, EFF wants to protect important, beneficial uses of this technology-including AI for legal research. That's why we weighed in on the long-running case of Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. This case raises at least two important issues: the use of (possibly) copyrighted material to train a machine learning AI system , and public access to legal texts.

As AI bot traffic grows, content creators are taking steps to protect their intellectual property from being scraped against their will. The publishing industry has spent the past year battling against the encroachment of AI tech, with companies like The New York Times and Ziff Davis suing AI platforms for scraping their copyrighted content and using it to train large language models.

In August 2024, HSI seized several domains belonging to the Streameast piracy network, including some backup domains. After the seizure, trying to access those sites resulted in a pop-up from HSI stating, 'THIS DOMAIN HAS BEEN SEIZED.' At the time, Streameast was one of the most well-known sites in the US for watching sporting events, including from the NBA, NFL, and MLB, illegally.

On September 23, 2025, John A. Squires-just sworn in as the 60th Director of the USPTO-issued his first public act. In his first official act as USPTO Director, John Squires held a ceremonial signing of two newly issued patents-one covering diagnostic methods using a discovered antibody and the the other a blockchain-based resource allocation FinTech software. U.S. Patent Nos. 12,419,201 and 12,419,202.

Two weeks ago, record company Hallwood Media signed a deal with Telisha "Nikki" Jones after negotiations that purportedly included an offer of $3 million, Billboard reported. Jones is a Mississippi-based lyricist behind the R&B artist "Xania Monet" whose most popular song on Spotify racked up over 1 million listens, and whose Reels regularly top 100,000 views on Instagram - despite her likeness, vocals, and music being AI-generated.

Yooo DHS i didnt approve to be used in this. I know you know my address so send a check. And please take this down and please keep me out of your 'banger' deportation videos. When it comes to immigration my thoughts and heart are alot more nuanced than this video allows. Bye! https://t.co/5v5gagf4Dr - Theo Von (@TheoVon) September 24, 2025

In a spirited discussion at our annual Women's IP Forum, attendees were treated to an insightful fireside-style chat conversation with the Honorable Judge Pauline Newman, a trailblazer for women in law and a luminary in the field of intellectual property. Judge Newman spoke with Renee C. Quinn, Chief Operating Officer of IPWatchdog, Inc., about her extraordinary career and her life journey.

Bayer's U.S. Patent No. 10,828,310, which claims methods for reducing cardiovascular events in certain patients by administering specific doses of rivaroxaban (2.5 mg twice daily) and aspirin (75-100 mg daily) "in amounts that are clinically proven effective." Generic manufacturers Mylan, Teva, and Invagen successfully challenged the patent in IPR proceedings - finding the claim term non-limiting. The Federal Circuit agreed that the term did not provide patentable weight - but through a different analytical path.

For several months now, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been posting ghoulish social media videos celebrating the agency's ramped-up immigration raid efforts. For its latest propaganda, ICE is appealing to a younger audience by setting a video of arrests to the Pokémon anime theme song. Not only was the clip posted to the Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) X/Twitter, but it was also uploaded to the official White House TikTok account.

The single biggest threat to the livelihood of authors and, by extension, to our culture, is not short attention spans. It is AI. The UK publishing industry worth more than 11bn, part of the 126bn that our creative industries generate for the British economy has sat by while big tech has swept copyrighted material from the internet in order to train their models.

John A. Squires was confirmed as USPTO Director on September 17, 2025. The Senate voted to confirm Squires using the "nuclear option" - although he received strong bipartisan support in the Judiciary Committee (20-2). Squires is a longtime patent attorney with experience in many aspects of the IP system: prosecution, litigation, licensing and deals, management, etc. He has a chemistry background prior to law school, and also worked for many years in fintech - the same field as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

The first point relates to the illegality of affixing paint on the wall of a building without the owner's consent, which in most cases constitutes the offence of criminal damage, subject to a maximum penalty in England of ten years behind bars. Because this wasn't just any old building but a Grade I listed building, the sentencing guidelines would instruct a judge to impose on a convicted offender a longer sentence within this range.

It is Constitution Day 2025, and I am freshly inspired by a lecture from my Colleague Dr. Carli Conklin on the "pursuit of happiness" as used in the Declaration of Independence. Her scholarship reveals the phrase is not a hedonistic right that might be implied when used today, but rather part a collective project of human flourishing rooted in virtue, knowledge, and useful improvements.

This week in Other Barks & Bites: the European Union Intellectual Property Office announces that it will host its first two-day Copyright Conference in November; the D.C. Circuit finds that Shira Perlmutter showed a likelihood of irreparable harm in granting injunctive relief allowing her to temporarily resume her role as Register of Copyrights; Novartis becomes the latest pharmaceutical company to lose constitutional challenges to the IRA Drug Price Negotiation

The Yuga Labs v. Ryder Ripps case is shaking up NFTs and trademarks.

Chatbots consume and regurgitate information from across the web, but they lack a standardized business model to compensate sources. That means those sources could one day dry up, leaving less information for the always-hungry AI, weakening its output. Enter the Real Simple Licensing (RSL) Standard, a new tech-based licensing solution for the "AI-first internet," as RSL puts it. It's backed by Reddit, Yahoo!, Ziff Davis (PCMag's parent company), People, Medium, WikiHow, Quora, Adweek, and more.