2025

Here’s What Happened: Cozy Comfort Co. manufactures and sells oversized hooded sweatshirts and blankets. Cozy Comfort has a design patent (see graphic). Cozy Comfort uses “THE COMFY” as a trademark for its products. Top Brand LLC also sells oversized hooded sweatshirts and blankets and uses the trademark “COMFY”. Cozy Comfort accused Top Brand of patent […]

The “Big Beautiful Bill” (BBB) is touted as eliminating income tax on Social Security benefits with the “No Tax on Social Security” slogan. But there is no income exclusion for Social Security benefits in the BBB. So what’s going on? Instead of a blanket exclusion from income, the BBB grants taxpayers age 65 or older […]

Here’s What Happened: Zunum Aero, Inc. developed aerospace technology for hybrid-electric aircraft and protected aspects of it as trade secrets. Zunum got Boeing Company’s attention. The parties entered into an investment agreement. The investment agreement contained a confidentiality clause. The agreement also restricted Boeing’s use of Zunum trade secrets to only what would be needed […]

Here’s What Happened: Since August 2019, foreign domiciled trademark applicants and registrants must be represented by a qualified US licensed attorney. Qualified means the attorneys are active members in good standing of the highest court in a US state or jurisdiction. The reason for the rule is simple. Individual attorneys who are not licensed to […]

Cyber-attacks on Section 401(k) plans and their participant accounts are not only increasing in number but, with the use of AI, they are increasing in sophistication. Plan fiduciaries, including employers which sponsor 401(k) plans, need to take steps to protect plan assts from these risks by implementing appropriate cybersecurity measures. All employees (not just HR […]

Here’s What Happened:Our blog post of 7/8/2025 covered the Bartz v. Anthropic decision. The court had decided Anthropic’s use of purchased works to train its large language model (LLM) for artificial intelligence was fair use. But, Anthropic’s use of pirated works would not be fair use. The court continued the matter for trial in December […]

Here’s What Happened: We know that courts are grappling with whether training of large language models (LLMs) results in copyright infringement. But what about patents? Recentive Analytics Inc. obtained patents for two types of machine learning models in the entertainment industry. The patents involve a method of scheduling live events and refining “network maps” for […]

Here’s What Happened: Another court has weighed in on whether copyrighted works can be used to train AI. In our last post, we discussed how a court ruled that Anthropic PBC’s use of works it had purchased to train AI was fair use. But use of pirated works was not fair use. Like Antrhopic, Meta […]

Consider Dave, the CFO at a medium sized company with a Section 401(k) retirement plan. Like many employers, the assets of the 401(k) plan are the largest pool of funds the employer has responsibility for. Because of the employer’s understandable concern about the management of these funds, the employer appoints Dave to run a company […]