Intellectual Property

The U.S. Supreme Court is set to commence its term on October 6. Among the cases it will review are several appeals concerning copyright and trademark law. One notable case seeks to address procedural inconsistencies and claims of unconstitutional vagueness attributed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

A new lawsuit against Perplexity AI claims responses generated by the artificial intelligence platform violate the trademarks of Encyclopaedia Britannica and Merriam-Webster by attributing false information to their widely esteemed brands. The complaint alleges Perplexity’s generative AI “answer engine” violates the plaintiffs’ copyrights and also cites them as sources of false or incomplete information.

In August, the Federal Circuit issued a surprisingly self-critical ruling in the long-standing dispute between Erik Brunetti and the USPTO over Brunetti’s efforts to register the term F*CK for a wide variety of goods and services. The Federal Circuit concluded that the Board’s decision in In re Brunett lacked sufficient clarity and therefore vacated it for further proceedings, which although facially unremarkable, may not only prove to be a boon to Brunetti, it may also be highly beneficial to many trademark owners who have been forced to wrestle with failure-to-function refusals.

A federal judge in the Northern District of California granted preliminary approval on September 25 to a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and a class of authors who alleged that the artificial intelligence company used their copyrighted works to train its chatbot Claude without their consent. The settlement is the largest copyright settlement of all time, covering 482,460 works and paying authors slightly more than $3,000 per work infringed.

The landscape for discretionary denials at PTAB is evolving quickly; both patent challengers and owners must adapt their strategies to ensure they are not left behind by the USPTO’s new approach.

Many companies have been participating in the growing trend of challenging counterfeit products of their goods by filing “Schedule A” lawsuits. These suits are mass actions typically alleging intellectual property infringement and they allow plaintiffs to sue many defendants at once, with the defendants’ names grouped in a “Schedule A” appendix attached to the complaint.

Federal Circuit: Board Erred in Finding No Likelihood of Confusion Between KIST and SUNKIST MarksFederal Circuit: No Jurisdiction Where Petitioner Offers a Non-Patent Law Related Ground for Relief

As AI becomes more sophisticated at detecting fakes, it is not just changing how brands protect themselves — it has the potential to change the legal framework for determining when platforms themselves might be held responsible for the counterfeits sold on their sites.