Late August 2026.

The metal band, the cartoon girl group, and the 150-city tour.

Demon Hunter, a Christian metal band formed in Seattle around the turn of the century, has sued Netflix, Netflix Studios and AEG Presents in the Central District of California over KPop Demon Hunters, an animated movie which has become a worldwide phenomenon. The band, suing through its corporate vehicle Hyde Lane, says it has used the mark for a quarter of a century; the complaint asks for an injunction, Netflix’s profits, treble and exemplary damages, and a jury.

However, the movie was not the trigger - it was the global concert tour, combined with merchandise and the soundtrack from the movie. The complaint says there are already cases of people buying tickets to Demon Hunter’s concerts, thinking they were buying tickets to the KPop Demon Hunters show. The complaint’s theory is that the defendants’ “superior resources” will eclipse the band’s established identity, and that the overlap creates a “substantial likelihood of confusion”. Netflix’s response: the allegations “are without merit”, and the film is “an Academy Award-winning global phenomenon”, which is true and is also not a defence anyone will find in the Lanham Act.

Why it matters. This is, in substance, a reverse-confusion case: not “they are trading on our fame” but “their fame is about to bury us”. The senior user is small and the junior user is enormous, which is precisely the situation the doctrine exists for. And the escalation path is instructive: a title inside a film is one kind of use; a touring act selling tickets and T-shirts is another.

Trademarks, from the top →

The training question finds its plaintiffs.

Last edition, we noted that the US$1.5 billion Bartz settlement bought peace over pirated books and said nothing about training. The follow-up is here: Round Hill Music, an independent publisher whose catalogue runs from the Kinks to the Goo Goo Dolls, has filed two suits in the Northern District of California: one against Suno (5:26-cv-08507), one against Anthropic (5:26-cv-08505). Each opens with roughly 500 “bellwether” compositions, announces an intention to amend to “potentially ten thousand or more”, and carries a damages theory the publisher says could exceed a billion dollars per case.

The complaints are built to avoid the settlement’s shape. Against Suno, Round Hill pleads removal of copyright management information and DMCA circumvention claims, alleging protected audio was scraped from licensed platforms, and names the data-scraping firm Bright Data as a contributory defendant. Against Anthropic, the allegation is that even after the output filters installed in response to earlier litigation, Claude still reproduces substantial parts of the catalogue, which the publisher characterises as willful infringement and squarely disputes as fair use.

Why it matters. The book settlement was widely misread as the price of training an AI on copyrighted works. These cases go after the training, outputs and how the songs were obtained. Plus, music may be harder to defend as fair use than books, since licensing songs is an established, functioning market.

Copyright, from the top →

Genuine pills, wrong label, still infringement.

Gilead Sciences, Inc. v. Meritain Health, Inc., No. 25-1828 (4th Cir. 13 Aug 2026). To cut costs, a US health plan administrator and a pharmacy benefit manager steered patients into an “alternative funding program”: prescriptions for Gilead’s HIV drug Biktarvy were filled by a pharmacy in Turkey, which shipped Turkish-labelled packs straight to patients in the US. The Fourth Circuit has now upheld the injunction that stops it.

The pills were genuine, but that didn’t help, since the Turkish packs were missing what the US version carries - namely, the “Rx only” marking, drug code, storage instructions, and the boxed warning about hepatitis B. And they travelled outside Gilead’s quality control - nobody monitored the temperature in transit, and no recall could ever reach them. Either problem alone can make a genuine product infringing; here there were both. The administrators could not plead ignorance either: their own internal emails showed they knew the drugs came from abroad, and that was enough for liability - no formal warning letter required.

Why it matters. “But they are genuine goods” is the most common defence in parallel-import disputes and the most commonly misunderstood. Exhaustion protects the resale of the thing the right-holder put on that market, in that condition. Change the label, the warnings or the cold chain, and the mark is now vouching for something its owner never shipped. That is the infringement.

The SEP wars arrive in the field.

Acer and Beijing Jingshi Intellectual Property Management have sued John Deere in Munich and Mannheim over 4G standard-essential patents: by ip fray’s count, the first cellular SEP campaign ever aimed at a maker of agricultural machinery. It is not a novelty that a modern tractor is connected to a mobile network - and everything that speaks 4G does so through somebody’s patents.

The venue is no accident either. Germany remains the preferred forum for SEP enforcement, and the Munich I Regional Court chose this same week to publish consolidated guidelines for FRAND licensing disputes, tidying its framework just as a new industry walks through the door.

Why it matters. The SEP licensing wave went through handsets, then through cars, acquiring pools, court frameworks and a great deal of case law on the way. Agriculture is next, and after it, plausibly, anything with a SIM card: harvesters, cranes, vending machines, the lot.

Patents, from the top →

Marking is homework, and it is also your licensees’ homework.

VDPP, LLC v. Volkswagen Group of America, Inc. (Fed. Cir. 19 Aug 2026). The Federal Circuit affirmed the dismissal of VDPP’s infringement suit on patent-marking grounds. Under 35 U.S.C. § 287(a), a patentee whose products (or whose licensees’ products) embody the patent must mark them, or damages only start running from actual notice. VDPP, a non-practising entity, had licensed others; the licensed products went out unmarked; the pre-notice damages went with them.

Why it matters. Marking is the least glamorous, but the most expensive clause to forget in a licence.

Also on the desk.

• Fees for winning nothing, continued. In ThermoLife International v. BPI Sports (18 Aug 2026), a divided Ninth Circuit panel affirmed an attorney’s fee award under the Lanham Act arising from previously dismissed trademark claims, deepening a circuit split on when a case is “exceptional” enough to shift fees. A question the Supreme Court will eventually have to feed.
• No standing to quibble with the certificate. In US Inventor v. Squires (Fed. Cir. 21 Aug 2026), an inventor advocacy group challenged the USPTO’s practice of printing that a patent grants “the right to exclude others” on the face of the document. The Federal Circuit held the group lacked standing, so the wording stays, and the philosophical argument about what a patent is returns to the seminar room.
• No hiding behind a straw man at the UPC. The Milan seat of the UPC’s central division held (20 Aug 2026) that a legal entity bringing a revocation action is a “concerned party” in its own right, declining to look through it for a puppeteer. Revocation-by-proxy remains, for now, a workable business model.
• Round two for Zoom. PulseLink filed a second Delaware patent complaint against Zoom (18 Aug 2026), this time on patents acquired from Avaya, a reminder that yesterday’s telecoms giants survive as today’s claim charts.