Intellectual property law

Intellectual property law

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.

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

Federal Circuit has denied this pair of related mandamus actions. In both cases, the patentee VirtaMove challenged venue transfer orders moving its patent infringement suits from the Western District of Texas to the Northern District of California. As I discuss below, the non-precedential decisions have some interesting jurisdictional tension with recent Fifth Circuit law. VirtaMove is a small Canadian software company holding patents on secure application containerization technology.

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.

In a significant victory for software patent applicants, the Federal Circuit reversed the a PTAB rejection of computer system claims in In re McFadden, 2024-2107 (Fed. Cir. Sept. 5, 2025). One problem with the decision is its non-precedential status - even though it clearly breaks new ground. The case offers another example of the potential power of 112(f) means-plus-function claims.

Evan Solomon's office stated he plans to address copyright within Canada's broader AI regulatory approach, focusing on protecting cultural sovereignty and creator involvement.

Ryan "Homebrew Homie" Daly had run Modded Hardware, a site that sold modded Switches able to install homebrew or pirated versions of Switch games, and sold the tools with which others could do the same. Nintendo also claimed the site would return Switches with pirated games pre-installed. Back in March 2024, Nintendo threatened to sue Daly over the site, and the two parties agreed that Daly would stop his naughty behavior and the whole thing would go away.

This week, U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Acting Director Coke Morgan Stewart posted another round of Director Discretionary Denial decisions to the PTAB Decisions page, almost all of which denied institution to America Invents Acts (AIA) patent validity trials. Stewart's recent rulings generally confirm the trend so far that a patent owner's settled expectations with respect to patents that have been in force for six years or more hold significant weight, although in two cases this trend was bucked.

The Federal Circuit's new opinion in Hyatt v. Stewart affirms a bench-trial judgment that the USPTO may invoke prosecution laches to defeat four of Gilbert Hyatt's pre-GATT civil actions under 35 U.S.C. § 145. The panel treated the availability of prosecution laches in §145 as settled by Hyatt v. Hirshfeld ("Hyatt I"), 998 F.3d 1347 (Fed. Cir. 2021), and rejected Hyatt's renewed argument that the Supreme Court's recent decisions on laches (Petrella and SCA Hygiene) foreclose an equitable time-bar in patent-issuance litigation.

The Federal Circuit is now considering a rehearing petition challenging the Federal Circuit's recent decision in Ingenico Inc. v. IOENGINE, LLC, 136 F.4th 1354 (Fed. Cir. 2025), which narrowed the scope of Inter Partes Review (IPR) estoppel under 35 U.S.C. § 315(e)(2). Under the statute - an IPR petitioner is estopped from later re-challenging a patent's validity based upon grounds that could have been raised in the IPR: