Celeste Varga
Partner | San Francisco | Intellectual Property Litigation
Profile
Celeste Varga is a partner in the San Francisco office of Corvane Ryle LLP and a member of the firm's Intellectual Property Litigation practice. She tries and resolves patent, copyright, trade secret and trademark disputes for technology, life sciences and consumer companies in federal courts, the International Trade Commission and arbitration.
Celeste is a leading voice on how intellectual property law applies to generative AI. She works with the firm's Artificial Intelligence team to defend and advise developers and deployers facing claims over training data, model outputs and open-weight licensing, and to help rights holders protect their content.
Her insight Training Data and Copyright: Litigation Trends in 2026 surveys the cases to watch. For a view of the advertising risks of synthetic media, see AI-Generated Advertising: Disclosure, Substantiation and Synthetic Media Risk.
Experience
Celeste Varga's representative matters include the following, many of which are confidential and described in general terms.
- Defended a generative AI developer in a putative class action alleging copyright infringement in the use of training data.
- Represented Kestrel Systems in a multi-patent dispute over inference accelerator technology before the International Trade Commission.
- Obtained a defense verdict for a software company in a jury trial on trade secret misappropriation claims in the Northern District of California.
- Represented Arvelo Health in a patent dispute concerning remote patient monitoring technology, resolved on favorable terms.
- Advised Halvern Retail Group on trademark and trade dress claims relating to private-label packaging.
- Represented a media company in enforcing its copyrights against unlicensed commercial use of its archive in model training.
- Led an appeal to the Federal Circuit on claim construction in a semiconductor design patent case.
- Defended Quillon Payments against patent assertions by non-practicing entities concerning mobile payment systems.
- Represented Meridian Arc Therapeutics in a dispute over inventorship and ownership of a drug discovery model.
- Advised a consumer electronics company on open source compliance and license enforcement risks across its product line.
- Represented a video game publisher in a copyright and trademark dispute over derivative works.
- Counseled Fennwick Home on counterfeit and gray market enforcement across online marketplaces.
- Defended a cloud provider in a patent litigation involving container orchestration technology.
Qualifications
Bar admissions
- State Bar of California
- US District Court for the Northern District of California
- US Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit
- US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Education
- JD, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
- BS, Electrical Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology