From Campbell v. Acuff-Rose to Andy Warhol Foundation v. Goldsmith, explore curated case dossiers complete with procedural postures, core holdings, judicial reasoning, and downstream precedential influence.
510 U.S. 569 (1994)
A commercial parody may qualify as fair use under 17 U.S.C. § 107. The commercial nature of a secondary use does not create an automatic presumption against fair use; rather, the more transformative the new work, the less will be the significance of commercialism under Factor 1.
598 U.S. 504 (2023)
The Andy Warhol Foundation's commercial licensing of 'Orange Prince' to Condé Nast does not qualify as fair use under Factor 1. When an original work and a secondary use share substantially the same commercial purpose, Factor 1 weighs against fair use unless there is an independent transformative justification.
593 U.S. 1 (2021)
Google's copying of the Java API declaring code was fair use as a matter of law. Reimplementation of declaring code to enable programmer skill portability in a novel computing environment satisfies the transformative purposes of copyright.
804 F.3d 202 (2d Cir. 2015)
Google's mass scanning of books to create a full-text searchable database and display snippets is transformative fair use. Non-expressive computational indexing provides enormous public benefit without creating a market substitute.
573 U.S. 208 (2014)
The claims are patent-ineligible because they target an abstract idea (intermediated settlement) and fail to provide an 'inventive concept' that transforms the abstract idea into a patent-eligible application.
514 U.S. 159 (1995)
A single color can be registered as a trademark under the Lanham Act if it has acquired secondary meaning identifying product source and does not serve a functional purpose.
No. 18-CIV-05135 (Cal. Super. Ct. 2020)
The $52 million settlement established an industry benchmark for content moderation occupational safety, requiring platforms to fund psychiatric diagnosis/treatment and mandate software mitigations (grayscale display, audio muting, 4-hour daily exposure limits).
No. 23-cv-00770 (N.D. Cal. 2024)
Workday can be held directly liable as an 'employment agency' and 'agent' under federal anti-discrimination laws because its AI software exercises delegated decision-making authority over job applicants.
569 U.S. 576 (2013)
A naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated. However, complementary DNA (cDNA) is patent eligible because it is synthetic and does not occur naturally in the human genome.
903 F.3d 1286 (Fed. Cir. 2018)
Substantial evidence supported the PTAB's determination of no interference-in-fact. Eukaryotic application of CRISPR-Cas9 was a non-obvious inventive leap requiring separate patent claims from generic prokaryotic gene editing.
No. 1:24-cv-00710 (M.D.N.C. 2024)
The DOJ complaint establishes the modern enforcement theory of algorithmic horizontal price fixing: sharing data through a centralized algorithmic hub substitutes collective algorithmic pricing for independent market competition.
DA 23-888 (FCC 2023)
The FCC issued its first-ever space debris enforcement penalty, finding DISH failed to properly deorbit EchoStar-7, imposing a $150,000 civil penalty, and establishing precedent for orbital debris regulatory enforcement.