Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court issued its first major omnibus order list of the October 2026 term, denying petitions for writ of certiorari in a series of intellectual property-related cases. These denials from the nation’s highest court leave in place contested rulings over the application of apportionment principles to damages in patent and trade secret cases. Other cert denials include appeals to IP-related claims barred under res judicata, including one petition arguing for a manifest injustice exception, and yet another challenge to the Section 101 patent-eligibility inquiry developed at the Federal Circuit.

In economic theory, corporate value creation can be attributed to many factors and conflicting preferences. Prioritizing different factors produces a set of different outcomes and the outcome that is seemingly most efficient becomes the accepted norm. Sometimes however, corporate actors rely on accepted business practices which, while taken in the pursuit of the most optimal outcome, facilitate market distortions. Hit by a compute-driven demand shock and faced with resource scarcity, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron have opted to allocate production capacity in a way that has exacerbated an industry- wide memory card supply shortage. But to fully understand why the price of hardware components and consumer electronic devices has been steadily surging, we must first start with Nvidia.

Carrie Hafeman, an independent inventor who has been fighting a years-long patent battle against Google and Microsoft, has filed a petition for rehearing of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit’s (CAFC’s) June 2026 precedential decision affirming Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) decisions invalidating all claims of three of her patents. Hafeman is pursuing her case pro se after her attorneys recently withdrew.