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“Good” Enough: Court Finds Certification Merely Defective on Pass-Through Claim

Client Alert | 1 min read | 05.04.16

In M.K. Ferguson Co. v. U.S. (Apr. 14, 2016), a case involving a pass-through claim compelled by the prime’s bankruptcy judge, the CFC denied the government’s motion to dismiss and held that the prime’s initial pass-through certification – which stated only that the prime was “authorized to certify the claim” – was not a “failure to certify” (which would have cost the court its jurisdiction) but was instead a “defective certification” that the prime could (and did) cure through its subsequent certification. Although the prime contractor had previously expressed “legitimate concerns as to the amount claimed” to the bankruptcy judge, the CFC concluded that the prime’s compliance with the bankruptcy court’s order showed the prime’s sponsorship was made in “good faith” and remanded to the agency for a final decision, after holding that the prime’s potential liability to the subcontractor (despite the discharge of liability in bankruptcy) was enough to satisfy the “modern” Severin doctrine.

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Client Alert | 8 min read | 06.30.25

AI Companies Prevail in Path-Breaking Decisions on Fair Use

Last week, artificial intelligence companies won two significant copyright infringement lawsuits brought by copyright holders, marking an important milestone in the development of the law around AI. These decisions – Bartz v. Anthropic and Kadrey v. Meta (decided on June 23 and 25, 2025, respectively), along with a February 2025 decision in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence – suggest that AI companies have plausible defenses to the intellectual property claims that have dogged them since generative AI technologies became widely available several years ago. Whether AI companies can, in all cases, successfully assert that their use of copyrighted content is “fair” will depend on their circumstances and further development of the law by the courts and Congress....