Appeals Court Upholds Dismissal of Patent Suit Against Live Nation and Ticketmaster
A U.S. appeals court has upheld the dismissal of a patent lawsuit against Live Nation, Ticketmaster and Major League Baseball. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit issued its ruling on Monday, October 26, 2026, and Music Business Worldwide reported the outcome on October 28.
The plaintiff, Amy Weissbrod Gurvey, brought the case herself, without a lawyer. Courts call this acting "pro se." She claims to own several U.S. patents describing a system for managing ticketing and sports betting. Her complaint, filed in federal court in Los Angeles on June 2, 2023, said the defendants infringed those patents.
The case was not decided on the patents themselves. The appeals court found that Gurvey gave up her arguments because she did not oppose the defendants' requests to dismiss the case. The district court gave her a 14-day deadline to respond. It later extended the deadline to February 2, 2024 for most of the requests, and she still did not file a response.
On September 27, 2024, the district court dismissed the case against every defendant in the appeal except Baker Botts, the law firm that had also been named. On March 13, 2025, it denied Gurvey's request to reconsider and dismissed the claims against Baker Botts. Those claims were barred under the Noerr-Pennington doctrine, a legal principle that protects people from liability for petitioning the government, including by filing lawsuits.
The Federal Circuit said the lower court had simply granted requests to dismiss that went unopposed, as its local rules allow, after giving Gurvey several chances to fix the problem. Its opinion is numbered 25-1954 in the court's records. The court also issued it as a nonprecedential ruling, which means it does not set a binding rule that other courts must follow.
Other defendants in the appeal include Live Nation Inc., Instant Live Concerts, MLB Advanced Media and Phish Inc./Live Phish. Law firms Hinshaw & Culbertson and Sheppard Mullin were also named, along with Sheppard Mullin attorney Steven Schortgen, who represented Live Nation and several other defendants in the appeal. A separate firm, Cowan, Liebowitz & Latman, once represented Gurvey and is also a defendant, but it was not a party to the appeal.
The filing history goes back further than this case. Gurvey has filed a series of complaints in federal and state courts since at least 2006. Those complaints allege that various combinations of the defendants infringed her patents, conspired to infringe them, or conspired to keep her from the courts.
For anyone who has bought a ticket online, the patent claims were about how ticket sales and betting were managed, not about prices or fees. The ruling does not decide whether those patents are valid. It means the case ends where it stands, with the dismissals in place.
