The Supreme Court held 6–3 that a copyright plaintiff who timely files under the discovery rule may recover damages for infringing acts occurring more than three years before filing, rejecting the argument that a separate three-year damages lookback window limits recovery.
The Supreme Court held that the Lanham Act’s trademark infringement provisions apply only to infringing use in commerce that occurs within the United States; foreign conduct is not actionable even if infringing products ultimately enter the U.S. market.
The Supreme Court held that when a defendant uses an allegedly parodic mark as a source identifier — as an actual trademark — the Rogers test for expressive works does not apply, and the ordinary likelihood-of-confusion analysis governs, with parody as a relevant but not dispositive factor.
The Supreme Court held 7-2 that the Andy Warhol Foundation’s commercial licensing of Warhol’s silkscreen portrait of Prince — based on a photograph by Lynn Goldsmith — was not fair use, because the commercial licensing purpose closely tracked the photographer’s own licensing market
The Supreme Court held 6-3 that a copyright owner’s failure to know that a single registration application could not cover both published and unpublished works did not necessarily constitute a ‘knowing’ inaccuracy that voids the registration — allowing courts to overlook good-faith
The Supreme Court held 5-4 that assignor estoppel — the doctrine preventing a patent inventor who has assigned their patent from later claiming the patent is invalid — remains a valid doctrine, but only applies when there is a direct conflict between the invalidity position and what the inventor war
The Supreme Court held 5-4 that the appointment of Administrative Patent Judges without Senate confirmation violated the Appointments Clause — but remedied the violation by making APJ decisions reviewable by the USPTO Director, rather than striking down the entire IPR system.
The Supreme Court held 6-2 that Google’s copying of approximately 11,500 lines of Java API declaring code to build the Android mobile operating system was fair use — holding that the declaring code’s function as an interoperability interface, combined with Google’s transformative u
The Supreme Court held that combining a generic word with “.com” does not automatically make the resulting term generic; whether a term is generic depends on consumer perception, and “Booking.com” is not generic for hotel reservation services.
The Supreme Court held 5–4 that Georgia’s officially adopted annotated code — including annotations prepared under legislative supervision — is not copyrightable under the government edicts doctrine, because works created by government officials exercising legislative or judicial authority bel