As it seems to do every few years, the Supreme Court has again waded into personal jurisdiction waters. The Court issued Ford Motor Co. v. Montana Eighth Jud. Dist. Ct., 141 S. Ct. 1017 (2021), on March 25, 2021. Ford is significant for a few reasons.
Introduction
“[I]t is entirely irrelevant to [the fair use] analysis that each Prince Series work is immediately recognizable as a ‘Warhol.’ Entertaining that logic would inevitably create a celebrity-plagiarist privilege.” Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, No. 19-2420-CV, 2021 WL 1148826 at *9 (2d Cir. Mar. 26, 2021) (internal citations and quotations mostly omitted).
In Vidstream, LLC. v. Twitter, Inc., No. 2019-00734 (Fed. Cir. Nov. 25, 2020), the Federal Circuit affirmed a decision by the PTAB holding Vidstream’s patent unpatentable over a reference submitted by Twitter. In doing so, the Federal Circuit addressed two issues that come up regularly in IPR practice: when the PTAB can consider evidence submitted by the petitioner on reply, and the date to which a prior art reference is entitled.
On December 27, 2020, bipartisan legislation was signed into law that will usher in significant changes to copyright and trademark law. We highlight below some of the key aspects of the new Copyright Alternative in Small-Claims Enforcement Act of 2020 (or CASE Act of 2020) and the Trademark Modernization Act of 2020 (or TM Act of 2020).
On December 7, 2020, the Federal Circuit issued a decision holding that a U.S. court can compel a party to transfer ownership over foreign patents and patent applications. The decision is SiOnyx LLC v. Hamamatsu Photonics K.K. et al., Case Nos. 2019-2359 & 2020-1217 (Fed. Cir. Dec. 7, 2020).