The settlement announced Tuesday between AP and the street artist who used an AP photo to create an iconic image of President Obama is a near-total win for the news organization, which will share rights to Fairey's image going forward. Now the AP is going after the company that sold clothing bearing the image Fairey created.

We usually think of Christopher Seeger of Seeger Weiss as an aggressive mass torts plaintiffs lawyer, but apparently he couldn't resist a juicy trade secrets case against Google--even though the case has a bit of a checkered history.

Thanks to a group of Hollywood studios and their lawyers at Munger, Tolles & Olson, Zediva's days of streaming individually-rented DVDs to online customers may be over.

Citing a forum selection clause in the companies' licensing agreement, Eli Lilly's lawyers at Morgan Lewis urged the Federal Circuit to nix the transfer of its patent case against Genentech to a new federal judge with strong IP chops.

The dispute over the image of Barack Obama in the iconic "Hope" poster is getting nastier. The Associated Press claims the artist routinely appropriates the work of others; the artist says the AP is selling unlicensed images of other artists' work.

Stanford prof Mark Lemley is a defendant in the suit brought by a lawyer who claims he was wrongfully named in a suit by two Yale law students who, in turn, claim they were defamed on a popular message board. Got that?

Since the Supreme Court denied cert in March in federal antitrust litigation over a $400 million Bayer settlement that kept Barr Labs from selling a Cipro knock-off, plaintiffs lawyers have pinned their hopes on state court litigation over the deal. Now those hopes have been considerably dimmed.

When an artist creates an iconic poster using a photograph taken by someone else, who owns the work? Shepard Fairey, the artist and guerilla marketer who designed the ubiquitous two-toned HOPE poster of President Barack Obama, has an answer: the artist. He's hired Stanford's Anthony Falzone, but the Associated Press--which took the photo that's the basis of Fairey's poster--has brought in its own big gun.

We expect Google to try to recoup the small fortune it surely paid Keker & Van Nest and two other firms to do battle with the likes of David Boies and top Morrison & Foerster IP litigators.