Nonfinal Office Action, U.S. Trademark Application Serial No. 99/704,819 (U.S.P.T.O. June 24, 2026) A great nickname can feel like a brand before anyone files a trademark application.  Fans use it, media members repeat it, and merchandise ideas follow naturally.  But trademark law does not protect a nickname simply because people associate it with a celebrity. […]

Recently, the Southern District of New York (“District Court”) denied Federal Treasury Enterprise’s (“FTE”) motion for partial summary judgment seeking to prevent (collaterally estop) Spirits International et. al (collectively, “SPI”) from re-raising issues of trademark ownership that had been decided in Dutch and Russian Courts.  Specifically, the District Court found that even if an international court is considered a “competent jurisdiction,” procedural differences […]

Exafer, Ltd. v. Microsoft Corp., No. 24-2296 (Fed. Cir. Mar. 6, 2026) In Exafer Ltd. v. Microsoft Corp., the Federal Circuit vacated a district court’s exclusion of expert damages testimony and clarified the proper reach of its 2018 decision in Enplas Display Device Corp. v. Seoul Semiconductor Co. which was understood to stand for the proposition that […]

Advance Local Media LLC v. Cohere Inc., No. 25-cv-1305 (S.D.N.Y. 2025) In another case addressing the use of copyrighted works by artificial intelligence technology (“AI”), the Southern District of New York denied a partial motion to dismiss a direct copyright infringement claim related to summaries generated by AI. The court held that the summaries could […]

The Federal Circuit recently issued its first precedential decision addressing derivation proceedings under the America Invents Act (“AIA”).  A derivation proceeding is a trial before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (“PTAB”) to determine whether the first-filed patent application was based on an invention taken from the true inventor without authorization.  It serves as a […]

Trump v. CASA, Inc., 145 S. Ct. 2540 (2025) In patent cases, successful patent owners can obtain an injunction against an infringer to prevent the infringer from making, using, and selling the infringing product in the United States.  Recently, there has been a lot of press questioning whether a district court sitting in one circuit […]