Mealey's Intellectual Property
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February 09, 2024
Photography Company Loses Bid For Home Venue In Copyright Case
SEATTLE — Allegations that a rental homeowner ended negotiations to purchase copyrighted images of his Idaho rental properties but then displayed the images online have been dismissed by a federal judge in Washington.
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February 09, 2024
Manuals Wrongly Excluded From Prior Art Analysis, Federal Circuit Rules
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Inter partes review (IPR) of two patents relating to a meat and cheese slicer was reinstated Feb. 8 by the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, which said the U.S. Patent Trial and Appeal Board not only wrongly found that manuals relied on by the petitioner were not publicly available but also erred in concluding that the remaining prior art failed to disclose two limitations.
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February 08, 2024
Petitioner: Integration Of Haptics In Augmented Reality Not New, Novel
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The Patent Trial and Appeal Board was urged Feb. 7 to cancel various claims of a patent directed to augmented reality (AR) applications that feature integrated haptics, or touch feedback, in a petition for inter partes review (IPR) by a gaming company.
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February 08, 2024
Judge Grants Consolidation In Journalists’ AI Suit Against Microsoft, OpenAI
NEW YORK — A federal judge in New York granted a motion to consolidate two journalists’ copyright infringement suit against OpenAI Inc. and related entities with previously consolidated cases involving fiction and nonfiction authors.
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February 08, 2024
Federal Circuit Tells Patent Board To Construe Claims As Proposed By Google
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Feb. 7 said an implicit claim construction by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board of a disputed term in a climate control patent was unduly narrow.
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February 07, 2024
Online News Site Suffers Blow; Panel Says Use Of Copyrighted Photo Not Fair
RICHMOND, Va. — The Independent Journal Review (IJR) must face allegations that it infringed a copyrighted photograph of musician Ted Nugent without a defense of copyright invalidity in place, the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled Feb. 6.
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February 07, 2024
Tesla Challenges Patented Vehicle Power Consumption Technology In New Petition
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — A patent that purportedly optimizes vehicle power consumption to yield improved fuel efficiency would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) by November 2005, the patent’s claimed priority date, Tesla Inc. tells the Patent Trial and Appeal Board.
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February 06, 2024
Board Wrongly Shifted Burden During Inter Partes Review, Patent Owner Says
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The owner of a patented treatment of pre-myopia, myopia or progression of myopia says in a new appeal the Patent Trial and Appeal Board wrongly declared the technology obvious.
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February 06, 2024
Motorized Dumbbell Is Patent-Eligible, Appellant Tells Federal Circuit
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Allowing a Utah federal judge’s determination of ineligibility under Section 101 of the Patent Act, 35 U.S.C. § 101, to stand “would be fundamentally unfair” and cause the patent owner, a self-described “innovator in weightlifting technologies” and “pioneer of selectorized dumbbells,” to lose valuable ground to market “latecomer” iFIT Inc., the patent owner tells the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in a Feb. 5 appellant brief.
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February 06, 2024
Panel Upholds Sanction But Reinstates Loofah Patent Infringement Case
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal magistrate judge in Arkansas did not abuse his discretion in sanctioning a patent owner for discovery abuse but committed several errors during claim construction, leading to a jury verdict and final judgment of noninfringement that must be vacated, the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found Feb. 5.
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February 06, 2024
Panel Affirms: Intake Form Insufficiently Creative For Copyright Protection
ST. LOUIS — A win for infringement defendant Berkshire Hathaway Automotive Inc. (BHA) has been confirmed by the Eighth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on grounds that the multinational conglomerate’s accused customer intake form is not copyrightable.
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February 06, 2024
Parties Debate Injunction Record, Await Ruling In OpenAI Trademark Dispute
SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI Inc. submitted what it portrays as an administrative motion to supplement the record but really is a local-rule-breaking attempt at filing a surreply in support of its motion for a preliminary injunction and fails to show the type of confusion the relief it seeks would warrant, defendants in a suit over a trademark and domain name argue in an opposition brief filed in California federal court.
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February 06, 2024
Patent Dispute Over Nasal Antiseptic Product Mooted, Michigan Federal Judge Finds
DETROIT — Citing an infringement defendant’s decision to pull from the market an accused nasal antiseptic and promise to refrain from manufacturing or selling the product in the near future, a federal judge in Michigan has dismissed the case as moot over the objection of the patent owner.
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February 05, 2024
Panel Upholds Denial Of New Trial, Does Not Reach Patent Ineligibility Claim
WASHINGTON, D.C. — The Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Feb. 2 said it need not address a conditional cross-appeal by prevailing patent infringement defendant Sony Interactive Entertainment LLC (SIE) in which the video console maker sought a determination of patent ineligibility in view of the panel’s holding in the same ruling that a patent owner is not entitled to a new trial.
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February 05, 2024
Microsoft Can Amend Invalidity Contentions, Defense In OneDrive Infringement Row
SEATTLE — In a Feb. 2 order addressing three motions he deemed “separate but ultimately related,” a federal judge in Washington granted Microsoft Corp. leave to amend its claim that three patents are invalid along with its counterclaims and affirmative defenses to allegations of infringement based upon a recent appellate ruling.
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February 05, 2024
Delaware Federal Judge Denies Bid For New Trial In Decade-Old Patent Case
WILMINGTON, Del. — A federal judge in Delaware on Feb. 2 closed a case initiated in 2013 against Google LLC, in which the tech giant was cleared at a May 2023 trial of allegations that it infringed a patent the jury also said is invalid.
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February 02, 2024
Panel: ‘Distributed Hypermedia’ System And Method Properly Declared Patent-Ineligible
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A patent owner failed to persuade the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to undo a determination of ineligibility by a federal judge in California, with the appellate panel declaring in a Feb. 1 decision that “interacting with data objects on the World Wide Web is an abstraction.”
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February 01, 2024
Hearst, Photographer Argue In High Court Briefs Over Copyright Discovery Rule
WASHINGTON, D.C. — In a reply brief supporting its petition for certiorari, Hearst Newspapers LLC asserts that the U.S. Supreme Court “has never applied a discovery rule to the Copyright Act” and has twice left the question open, representing that the present copyright dispute over the online use of photographs, presents “a simple and clean record” for the court to resolve the “flawed” reasons that circuits have applied the atextual rule.
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February 01, 2024
Scope Of Blue Cross Common-Law Trademark Rights Not Ripe For Adjudication
BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — A federal judge in Alabama on Jan. 31 denied a bid for summary judgment that the first two plans to use the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association (BCBSA) trademarks acquiesced to later use by other plans or engaged in naked licensing of the marks.
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February 01, 2024
Appellant: Defendant Wrongly Deemed A Noninfringer Of Pump Deployment Patent
WASHINGTON, D.C. — Findings by a federal judge in Massachusetts that a heart pump product line does not infringe six patents were premised on an erroneous construction of several disputed claim terms, a patent owner argues in a brief filed with the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals.
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February 01, 2024
Home Chef Asks High Court To Standardize Trademark Likelihood-Of-Confusion Test
WASHINGTON, D.C. — After being denied injunctive relief in a trademark dispute with GrubHub Inc., a food preparation firm filed a petition for certiorari, asking the U.S. Supreme Court to rule that courts must consistently consider all of the relevant factors when undertaking a likelihood-of-confusion analysis in an infringement lawsuit.
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February 01, 2024
Panel Backs District Court, Says Irreparable Harm Unproven In Patent Case
WASHINGTON, D.C. — A federal judge in Delaware committed no abuse of discretion in denying a patent owner’s request for a preliminary injunction that would bar a competitor from launching its planned 5G in-flight broadband network, the Federal Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals concluded Jan. 31.
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February 01, 2024
Harvard Patent, Licensed To 10X Genomics, Should Be Canceled, Petitioner Says
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Nanostring Technologies Inc. in a petition for inter partes review (IPR) tells the Patent Trial and Appeal Board that although a challenged independent claim of a patented method for imaging nucleic acids is “lengthy and detailed,” “length and detail should not be mistaken for inventiveness.”
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January 31, 2024
Dismissal Bid Denied In Rare Criminal Trademark Counterfeiting Case
PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge in Pennsylvania on Jan. 30 said that criminal charges against the operator of a website where the trademarks of brand name drugs were used in connection with the sale of “prop” pills will remain in place.
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January 31, 2024
5th Circuit Issues Limited Remand Over Typos In Trademark Injunction
NEW ORLEANS — A federal judge in Texas properly declared the “Rolex” trademarks infringed by a watch reseller, but two typographical errors in a subsequent permanent injunction render the ordered relief “vague and unqualified,” the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has concluded.