Mid-August 2026.

The dog toy wins. This time it is over.

VIP Products, LLC v. Jack Daniel’s Properties, Inc., No. 25-2027 (9th Cir. 4 Aug 2026). The Ninth Circuit reversed the permanent injunction against the “Bad Spaniels” squeaky toy and remanded with instructions to enter judgment for VIP. Dismissal of the infringement claim, for want of a likelihood of confusion, was affirmed.

The interesting half is tarnishment. Jack Daniel’s expert evidence went to general consumer associations (people dislike thinking about dog mess next to whiskey), and the court held that this did not establish that this toy tarnished the mark. The district court’s “critical misstep” was leaving the parody out of the tarnishment analysis altogether.

The reasoning has a pleasing circularity to it. A parody that lands is understood as a joke; a joke understood as a joke does less harm to the thing it is joking about; so the better the parody, the heavier the plaintiff’s evidentiary load. Succeeding at being funny is now a defence to the allegation that you were not funny.

Why it matters. The Supreme Court’s 2023 decision in this same fight removed the Rogers shortcut for marks used as marks, and was widely read as a win for brand owners. Three years later the brand owner has lost the whole case. What Jack Daniel’s actually did was move the fight from a threshold test to the evidence, and the evidence turns out to be expensive.

Same two chains, three registers, three answers.

The UK Intellectual Property Office has allowed Supermac’s name and logo onto the UK register for fast-food restaurant services, rejecting McDonald’s opposition founded on BIG MAC and McCAFE. The hearing officer found visual, aural and conceptual differences sufficient that the average consumer would make no link between the marks.

Hold that next to the rest of the file. In 2024 the EU General Court partially revoked McDonald’s BIG MAC registration for non-use as to certain goods and services. In June 2026 the EUIPO refused Supermac’s own EU application for the logo, finding it too close to BIG MAC. In August 2026 the UKIPO registered essentially the same logo.

Why it matters. This is territoriality doing exactly what it says on the tin, and it is the single hardest idea to get across to a founder who has just registered one mark and believes they are finished. There is no world trademark. Three offices looked at two brands and produced three answers, and all three can be right at once, because each was answering a different question about a different register.

Trademarks, from the top →

A billion and a half for the library. Nothing for the training.

Bartz v. Anthropic has moved from litigation to administration, and the administration is where the argument now lives. The headline figures: US$1.5 billion plus interest; 440,490 of the 482,460 listed books held eligible; roughly US$3,000 a work; claims filed on at least 91.3% of eligible works; 350 valid opt-outs covering 1,802 works. Counsel were awarded US$101.56 million (about 6.8%), cut down from the 20% originally sought.

Commentators have called it the largest copyright recovery on record. It is worth being precise about what was bought with it. The settlement resolves claims over pirated copies (the acquisition and retention of the books) and not over the training of a model on them. Works from the Books3 dataset were left out for want of usable metadata.

Why it matters. Every headline about this number treats it as the price of training an LLM on books. It is not. It is the price of having downloaded them from the wrong place. The training question is still open, and the cases that will actually answer it are still moving.

eBay finally arrives at the preliminary injunction.

Socket Solutions, LLC v. Import Global, LLC, No. 2025-1121 (Fed. Cir. 4 Aug 2026). Held: there is no presumption of irreparable harm on a motion for a preliminary injunction in a patent case. The district court erred to the extent it leaned on a presumption once a clear showing of validity and infringement had been made. The subject matter, for the record, was electrical wall outlet covers.

eBay v. MercExchange killed the presumption for permanent injunctions in 2006. It has been the obvious inference ever since that the same reasoning reaches the preliminary stage, and the Federal Circuit has been declining to say so for two decades. It has now said so.

Why it matters. Practically, not much changes: district courts had largely got there on their own. Doctrinally, a twenty-year loose end is tied off, and the movant now carries the harm burden expressly rather than by local custom.

A provisional counts only as far as it supports the claims.

Dental Monitoring SAS v. Align Technology, Inc., No. 25-1752 (Fed. Cir. 10 Aug 2026). Since the AIA, the USPTO and the PTAB had taken the loose view: to get its provisional’s filing date as a prior-art date, a reference needed only to be entitled to claim priority, and the provisional needed only to describe the subject matter being relied on. Support for the reference’s own claims was not required. That was the Board’s precedential Penumbra rule, and it had stood for some thirteen years.

The Federal Circuit rejected it and reinstated the stricter Dynamic Drinkware standard: the provisional must supply § 112 support for the claims of the reference itself. The burden sits on whoever relies on the reference.

Why it matters. This one runs the opposite way to most prior-art news: less prior art qualifies, not more. A reference whose provisional does not support its own claims loses the early date, and in some cases stops being prior art at all. Good news if you are defending a patent. If you are running an invalidity case built on references dated to their provisionals, some of those dates have just moved forward, and the references need re-checking.

Can a website infringe in a country it refuses to serve?

Fassbinderei, C-584/26, referred by the Austrian Oberster Gerichtshof. The defendant runs a site on a .at domain. It is geo-blocked so that Austrian users cannot reach it. It carries a notice reading “this website is not intended for the Austrian market”. It has no Austrian customers. Does the domain name nonetheless infringe an Austrian trademark?

The question referred is a single one: do the principle of territoriality and Article 10(2) and (3) of Directive (EU) 2015/2436 preclude an injunction against a defendant domiciled in the same Member State as the claimant, where the site under that ccTLD is unreachable in the territory of protection because of geo-blocking and carries a disclaimer to that effect? Hovering behind it is the EU Geo-Blocking Regulation, which exists to discourage precisely the blocking now being offered as a defence.

Why it matters. A country-code domain is a public, permanent claim to a national market, and it is registered long before anybody thinks about who can load the page. If a disclaimer plus a geo-fence is enough, the ccTLD land grab gets a great deal cheaper. If it is not, a lot of currently dormant domains are infringements.

Also on the desk.

• Design patents, still unsettled. The Federal Circuit denied rehearing en banc in Range of Motion Products, LLC v. Armaid Company, Inc. (No. 23-2427, panel opinion 2 Feb 2026), over a fractured court. The open question (whether judges should be construing drawings at all, and what work “plainly dissimilar” and functionality do in the infringement test) stays open.
• AI applications are getting refused more often. Patently-O reports that applications classified as AI draw section 101 rejections at substantially higher rates than comparable non-AI applications, against a background of allowance rates falling generally.
• OpenAI is now a patent filer. Six years into measurable activity, its application volume has passed Adobe and HP. Whatever one thinks of the AI-and-IP argument, one side of it is busy filing.
• Trade secrets, talent and tactics. The Apple / OpenAI dispute over engineer hiring is producing unusual procedural manoeuvres, while the identification-with-particularity question (how precisely a claimant must define the secret before discovery) is live again after Gompert.