The Briefing: Trademark Basics - Protecting Names, Logos, and Brands in Entertainment
The Rise of OTAs in Defense Contracting: Opportunities, Risks, and What Contractors Need to Know
Money-Saving Licensing Tips for Startups
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
PODCAST: PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - Cease and Desist Letters: Protecting Your Intellectual Property the Right Way
A Counterintuitive Approach to Winning Without Litigation: One-on-One with Haley Morrison
SkadBytes Podcast | Tech’s Shifting Landscape: Five Trends Shaping the Conversation
Tips for Conducting a Trade Secret Assessment with Rob Jensen
Will I Get Sued if I Create Another Hospital Drama? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
Essential Steps to Sell Your Business
Mickey Mouse: un ratón con abogado
(Podcast) The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
The Briefing: The Ninth Circuit Puts the Brakes on Eleanor’s Copyright Claim
Unexpected Paths to IP Law with Dan Young and Colin White
Why Can't I Clean the Graffiti Off My Walls? — No Infringement Intended Podcast
(Podcast) The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
The Briefing: Trademark Smoked: The Fall of General Cigar’s COHIBA Registration
PODCAST: Williams Mullen's Trending Now: An IP Podcast - NCAA Name, Image, Likeness (NIL) Update – Effects of House Settlement
How IP Can Fuel Your Startup's Growth
The recent ruling in a lawsuit against Anthropic highlights a growing complexity in how courts are approaching fair use in the context of AI training. Judge William Alsup held that developing Anthropic’s Claude model was...more
Can a car be a copyrightable character? In Carroll Shelby Licensing v. Halicki, the Ninth Circuit said no — ruling that “Eleanor,” the iconic Mustang from ‘Gone in 60 Seconds,’ lacks the distinctiveness and consistency...more
Ninth Circuit holds that custom Ford Mustang called “Eleanor,” which appeared in four films from 1974 to 2000, is not entitled to character copyright protection under Towle test and that licensor of custom car design did not...more
Ninth Circuit affirms dismissal of copyright infringement claim against musician Lil Nas X, finding that mere availability of plaintiff influencer’s photographs on Instagram does not amount to access to those photographs and...more
Ninth Circuit reverses summary judgment in favor of pop singer Sam Smith in music copyright dispute, holding in unpublished opinion that hook in plaintiff’s song may be protectable as unique selection and arrangement of...more
Given that litigation in the United States can take years from start to finish, we rarely see a conclusion to the cases we follow. In a prior blog post, we looked at the potential recusal requirements of the U.S. Supreme...more
In a significant decision, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that the Copyright Act of 1976 requires human authorship to register a work, affirming the district court’s denial of a...more
On March 18, 2025, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the D.C. District Court’s and U.S. Copyright Office’s decisions, holding that a copyrighted work cannot be authored exclusively by an AI system. Computer...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit recently affirmed that artificial intelligence (AI) cannot be the sole author on a copyright-registered work, but questions still remain as to the future of AI...more
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has affirmed a district court ruling that human authorship is a bedrock requirement to register a copyright, and that an artificial intelligence system cannot be deemed the...more
On March 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued a decision in the Thaler v. Perlmutter case, which confirmed the refusal of copyright registration for a work created entirely by an artificial...more
Does copyright law require that a human create a work? Yesterday the D.C. Circuit in Thaler v. Perlmutter held that it does and that a machine (such as a computer operating a generative AI program) cannot be designated as the...more
“Aber ist es Kunst?” - That question—“But is it art?”—was before the German Bundesgerichtshof (“BGH”), or Federal Court of Justice, in a recent proceeding involving the well-known Birkenstock sandal design. ...more
This case tested the contours of the landmark Google v. Oracle computer software code fair use decision. Astronics, a military aerospace contractor, was accused of copying code from Teradyne, a competitor, in order to ensure...more
In this edition of The Precedent, we outline the recent federal circuit decision in Bitmanagement Software GmbH v. United States (Fed. Cir. Jan. 7, 2025)....more
In a summary order, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the district court’s orders in a case involving an ownership dispute over the copyrights to certain compositions by Parliament-Funkadelic bandleader...more
In a strategic move to preserve their right to seek reconsideration of previously dismissed DMCA § 1202(b) claims, the plaintiffs in Andersen v. Stability AI have voluntarily dismissed with prejudice all DMCA claims. The...more
In a case brought by a group of record labels against an internet service provider (ISP) for contributory copyright infringement of more than 1,400 songs, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that the provider,...more
In a copyright case, the US Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit determined that the district court had jurisdiction over two Chinese companies that consented to jurisdiction in any judicial district in which a third-party...more
Affirming the application of the fair use defense to copyright infringement, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit determined that a district court’s sua sponte invocation of a fair use defense to parallel trademark...more
The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed a district court’s judgment of copyright infringement against an internet book archive, holding that its free-to-access library did not constitute fair use of the...more
In an unpublished opinion, the US Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit affirmed a district court’s decision finding that a pro se Californian artist failed to establish that an Italian artist had reasonable opportunity...more
In a case of first impression, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that there is no “sophisticated plaintiff” exception to the Copyright Act’s discovery rule, which provides that a copyright claim only accrues...more
Since the release and popularization of platforms such as Midjourney and DALL-E, the past few years have seen a staggering proliferation of art made using text-to-image models—familiarly known as “AI art.” Tens of millions of...more