What went wrong is plain from the record. Phillips 66 courted Propel, obtained deep access to Propel’s models and strategy during diligence, and repeatedly signaled that a deal was on track. Inside Phillips 66, however, executives debated a “go it alone” pivot while still drawing on Propel’s information. The team that had supported diligence began […]

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 […]

Top Brand v. Cozy Comfort Company, Case No. 2024-2191 (Fed. Cir. July 17, 2025) The USPTO must reject a patent application if the applicant’s claim covers what the prior art already disclosed, and patent applicants may respond to such rejections with arguments that what they claimed was different.  Prosecution history disclaimer (i.e. ‘disclaimer by argument’) prohibits […]

Optis Cellular Tech., LLC v. Apple Inc., No. 22-1925 (Fed. Cir. June 16, 2025) Over a decade ago, the U.S. Supreme Court arguably made it easier to invalidate a patent for claiming nonpatentable abstract ideas when it established a two-step test for evaluating whether patent claims are drawn to patentable subject matter, referred to as […]

In 1984, acclaimed composer Jay Livingston assigned his interests in numerous musical compositions, including the classics “Silver Bells” and “Que Sera, Sera” to a publishing company called Jay Livingston Music (“JLM”).  In 1985, Jay created a family trust, transferring to it his royalty rights flowing from the JLM transfer, making Travilyn (his daughter), Tammy (his […]

In Bartz et al. v. Anthropic, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California considered whether Anthropic’s use of copyrighted books—many sourced from pirated libraries, others destructively scanned from purchased print copies—to train its Claude AI models qualified as fair use.  The court held that the latter was fair use; the former was not.  […]