Analysis

OpenAI's Rogue Agents A 'Warning Shot' For Cos. Everywhere

By Sarah Jarvis

OpenAI's recent rogue artificial intelligence incident will likely set the stage for a more widespread expectation that companies using advanced, agentic AI have reasonable protective measures in place, as cyber incidents carried out by AI agents come to be viewed as foreseeable risks.

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DC Circ. Backs Fair Use Repairs On Med Device Software

By Elliot Weld

The D.C. Circuit on Tuesday ruled that using copyrighted data and computer programs for the purpose of repairing medical devices falls under the fair use exemption, rejecting a challenge from two industry groups that wanted to compel the Library of Congress to revise its rules on the issue.

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Unified, Industry Orgs. Again Push Justices On PTAB Policies

By Dani Kass

Unified Patents, Clearing House Payments subsidiary Askeladden and a series of industry groups have continued pressing the U.S. Supreme Court to accept petitions addressing the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's patent review authority, this time in a case brought by Tesla.

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5th Circ. Judge Hints Court Order With AI Errors Can't Stand

By Spencer Brewer

A Fifth Circuit judge wanted to know why a panel should keep intact a court order blocking an anti-DEI Mississippi law that contained artificial intelligence hallucinations, asking whether the judges could confidently find that made-up citations did not ultimately sway the district court's decision.

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Meta Beats UK Co. Suit Over Instagram Shopping For Now

By Aneeta Mathur-Ashton

A California federal judge has ruled in favor of Meta in an antitrust suit from a British company alleging Meta stole its plan for Instagram shopping, saying the injuries that were alleged happened years before the complaint was filed.

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Music Publishers Fight To Keep $3B Anthropic IP Case Alive

By Hailey Konnath

Major music publishers on Monday urged a California federal court not to throw out their $3 billion suit accusing Anthropic PBC of "brazen" mass copyright infringement of sheet music and songbooks, arguing that Anthropic's "thin challenges" to their claims mischaracterize the law and disregard their "extensive" allegations.

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Jason Isbell Says Suno Exploits Identities Like 'The Borg'

By Rae Ann Varona

Grammy winner Jason Isbell and several other musicians have lodged a proposed class action in Massachusetts federal court against Suno Inc., accusing the AI music generator company of extracting and exploiting musicians' identifying attributes much like a collective of identity-erasing cybernetic aliens from the Star Trek franchise.

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Analysis

Image Search Technology Raises New Copyright Questions

By Ivan Moreno

Technology that can uncover decade-old online images is testing the practical limits of copyright’s discovery rule, as courts weigh reasonable diligence against the reality that sophisticated search tools still miss infringement and defendants may no longer possess records proving authorization.

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Approach The Bench: Judge Rodriguez On The Uses Of AI

By Cara Bayles and Steven Trader

Today, Judge Xavier Rodriguez is known as an expert in electronic discovery and a proponent of artificial intelligence, but his interest was piqued before he joined the bench of the Western District of Texas in 2003, when he was still a lawyer and the methods for sifting through electronically stored information were still primitive.

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Satellite Permitting, Robocall Bills Sail Through Subcommittee

By Nadia Dreid

The SAT Streamlining Act was one of half a dozen bills that breezed through a House energy and commerce subcommittee Tuesday afternoon, with lawmakers managing to get all six bills sent along to the full committee in under an hour.

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DirecTV Says Emergency Alert Symbols Are A Hard Sell

By Nadia Dreid

The Federal Communications Commission's heart was in the right place when it floated the idea of requiring emergency alerts to include visual symbols, but satellite television providers just aren't set up to display those symbols, DirecTV has told the agency.

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Brief

FCC Pulls Montana Radio License Over Unpaid Fees

By Christopher Cole

The Federal Communications Commission said Tuesday it was revoking a Montana radio station's license for unpaid regulatory fees going back several years.

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FCC Tells Justices To Keep Campaign Ad Pricing 'Status Quo'

By Katie Buehler

The Federal Communications Commission has joined a call for the U.S. Supreme Court to lift a Fourth Circuit order blocking it from extending discounted television and radio advertising rates to committees that buy spots in coordination with political candidates, urging the justices to maintain the "status quo," despite allegedly inconsistent characterizations of the norm. 

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GM Can't Escape Fla. EV Charger Defect Class Action

By Jonathan Capriel

A Florida federal judge largely rejected GM's attempt to dismiss a proposed class action over its Ultium electric vehicle chargers, allowing a couple's deceptive trade practice claims to proceed on the theory that the automaker hid defects causing the chargers to repeatedly fail and overheat.

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Interior Board Stays BLM Data Center Approval In Nevada

By Tom Lotshaw

A U.S. Department of the Interior appeals board said Tuesday that environmental groups are likely to show that officials violated the National Environmental Policy Act when they used a review completed for a solar power generation facility to approve the first-ever data center on federal land.

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4 Mass. Rulings You May Have Missed In August

By Julie Manganis

Three fertility doctors defeated claims they violated a nonsolicitation agreement, while a consulting company failed in its effort to amend a four-year-old contract suit that has already been extensively litigated, among other notable Massachusetts state court rulings in August.

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Meta Says Section 230 Frees It From Doctor's Scam Suit

By Mike Curley

Meta Platforms Inc. is urging a California federal court to throw out an Australian doctor's suit alleging that its advertising tools resulted in his name and likeness being used to promote scams, saying evidence now shows that none of its tools introduced his name or likeness.

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Netflix, Ramey Spar Over Patent Suit Atty Fees

By Elliot Weld

Netflix and prolific patent attorney Bill Ramey have each made arguments for how much Ramey and his firm should be assessed in attorney fees in a patent infringement suit after a California federal court found it was meritless, with Netflix advocating for $3 million from Ramey's firm and his former client, while Ramey requested a finding of no fees or at least lower fees.

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Copyright Chief Says Cook Ruling Bolsters Firing Challenge

By Ivan Moreno

The U.S. Copyright Office's Shira Perlmutter has asked the D.C. Circuit to reverse a federal judge's refusal to block her firing by the Trump administration, arguing that the U.S. Supreme Court's June decision protecting Federal Reserve Gov. Lisa Cook undercuts the lower court's reason for denying her preliminary relief.

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Eve Legal Says AI.Law Doc Drafting Patent Is Invalid

By Emily Sawicki

California legal tech company Eve Legal wants out of a patent lawsuit brought by Ohio-based rival AI.Law, telling a San Francisco federal judge that the patent is insufficient, covering little more than using ordinary artificial intelligence tools to draft legal documents.

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Meta AI Glasses Privacy Suit Expands To Add Bystander Class

By Lauren Berg

Dozens of consumers are joining forces to sue Meta Platforms over allegations that the tech giant surreptitiously stores private videos captured by its "smart" glasses to train its artificial intelligence models, adding claims on behalf of bystanders who never agreed to be recorded, let alone used for training.

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X.AI Neighbors Defend Miss. Data Center Noise Claims

By Isaac Monterose

A proposed class of Mississippi residents on Monday fought X.AI Corp.'s motion for dismissal of several claims in their nuisance suit, arguing that they've sufficiently alleged that Elon Musk's tech giant has harmed them by building a noisy industrial gas power plant in the city of Southaven that powers data centers.

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Broadcom's Bid To Boost Royalties Prompts BMW Patent Suit

By Rae Ann Varona

BMW has urged a Texas federal court to declare that the German automaker does not infringe a trio of communication technology patents a Broadcom subsidiary owns, alleging in a complaint that Broadcom has been threatening litigation after BMW refused to renew a license agreement at a much higher price.

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Watchdog Sues To Unmask Feds' 'Secret' Frontier AI Review

By Lauren Berg

A nonprofit ethics watchdog accused the Trump administration in D.C. federal court Tuesday of failing to hand over information about the "secret de facto regulatory regime" governing frontier artificial intelligence models.

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Fox Investor Sues Over Morgan Stanley Role In $22B Deal

By Jarek Rutz

A Fox Corp. stockholder has sued the media company and its board in the Delaware Chancery Court, seeking to block a shareholder vote tied to Fox's planned $22 billion acquisition of Roku Inc. until investors receive more information about alleged conflicts involving financial adviser Morgan Stanley.

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Samsung Mini LED TVs Lack Actual Mini LED Tech, Rival Says

By Gina Kim

Samsung is falsely touting some of its televisions as incorporating advanced Mini LED technology that provides higher quality picture, despite that it simply "recycled" its preexisting low-end standard LED TV and relabeled them as a "supreme" Mini LED, alleges a Lanham Act suit filed Monday in California federal court.

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Brief

HP Beats Printer Customers' Ink Cartridge Antitrust Fight

By Lauraann Wood

HP Inc. customers seeking to hold the printer-maker liable for preventing them from using third-party ink cartridges in their machines have still not pled consumer fraud or antitrust claims viable enough to proceed, an Illinois federal judge said Tuesday.

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Monthly Merger Review Snapshot

By Bryan Koenig

Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery pressured state attorneys general challenging their merger to settle, the Federal Trade Commission successfully challenged a construction adhesives tie-up, state officials waded in against the NextEra-Dominion transaction, and Union Pacific Corp. and Norfolk Southern Corp. defended their combination under review by federal regulators.

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Fenwick-Led GoPro Merges With Starman In $285M Deal

By Jade Martinez-Pogue

Fenwick & West LLP-advised camera company GoPro Inc. on Tuesday unveiled plans to merge with optical-photonics company Starman Optical Inc. in a $285 million deal.

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Calif. Privacy Agency Keeps Regulatory Heat On Data Brokers

By Allison Grande

A Virginia-based data broker has become the latest enforcement target of the California Privacy Protection Agency, which announced Tuesday that the company would pay a $36,400 fine and commit to honoring requests made through a new consumer data deletion tool to resolve claims that it failed to timely register as a data broker.

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4th Circ. Told Geofence Warrant Doesn't Meet New Standards

By Parker Quinlan

The Fourth Circuit has been asked to rule that the geofence warrant at the heart of a major U.S. Supreme Court decision clarifying standards for location-data searches did in fact authorize an unconstitutional search in light of the high court's ruling.

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Honeywell Aerospace To Pay $2M In Security Lapses Case

By Hayley Fowler

Honeywell Aerospace Inc. will pay $2 million to settle a False Claims Act suit alleging it failed to provide basic cybersecurity protections for government data under defense contracts it won for quantum-computing services, the U.S. Justice Department announced Tuesday.

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What Nonbank Lenders Should Watch In 'Open Banking' Redo

Nonbank mortgage lenders should prepare for several key changes in the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's anticipated open banking rule rewrite that could reshape verification costs, vendor relationships and loan workflows, says Kara Ward at Baker Donelson.

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How Does In-House Pay Compare? Take The Law360 Survey

How do in-house salaries vary across industries, roles, and organizational revenue? What compensation tools are companies using to lure top talent? Help Law360 Pulse answer these questions and more in this year's In-House Compensation Survey.

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HSF Kramer Added To $1B King & Spalding Malpractice Suit

By Jack Karp

Herbert Smith Freehills Kramer LLP and several of its partners on Tuesday were added to a $1 billion legal malpractice suit against King & Spalding LLP alleging that the firms engaged in multiple schemes to enrich a lawyer's friend at the expense of investment firm White Oak Advisors.

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Fla. Bar Tosses Complaint Over DHS GC's 'Worst' Judge Posts

By Adrian Cruz

The Florida Bar has refused to investigate the general counsel of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for potential ethics violations over his recent series of social media posts attacking sitting judges, citing a potential conflict with the authority of the federal government.

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Judges Say Social Media, Political Rhetoric Endanger Them

By Adrian Cruz

Increased access to social media and personal data via the internet, a larger number of high-profile cases, and inflammatory comments made by politicians have led to a rise in violent threats against judges and concerns about their safety, according to a recently published report.

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Ex-Warriors GC, DEI Exec Say Bias Complaints Led To Firings

By Lauren Berg

The Golden State Warriors' former associate general counsel and its former vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion allege they were unlawfully fired in retaliation for speaking up about enduring a workplace marked by gender and race-based discrimination.

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NY Firm, Clinics Reject FedEx's 'Staged' Crashes Claims

By Linda Chiem

A New York personal injury firm and various healthcare providers have told a Manhattan federal judge that FedEx has asserted implausible claims alleging they orchestrated an insurance fraud scheme to fabricate medical records and inflate accident claims, saying there is no such racketeering enterprise.

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Brief

Barnes & Thornburg Says Ex-NBA Star Owes $1M Legal Fees

By Jonathan Capriel

Former NBA player Luol Deng is being sued for more than $1 million by a Chicago-based law firm that claims he failed to pay legal fees connected to two real estate matters, according to a suit filed in Illinois state court.

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Roundup

The Top In-House Hires Of August

By Michele Gorman

Legal department hires during the past month included high-profile appointments at Anthropic, Zillow and ConocoPhillips. Here, Law360 Pulse looks at some of the top in-house announcements from August.

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