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Thomson Reuters scored a major victory in its AI copyright lawsuit against Ross Intelligence, a now-defunct legal startup.
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, accused Ross Intelligence of using copyrighted content from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw platform to create an AI-powered competitor. On Tuesday, US Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas dismissed Ross Intelligence’s fair-use defense and ruled that the startup had infringed on Thomson Reuters’ copyright.
Westlaw provides paid users access to judicial decisions, state and federal regulations, law journals, editorials, and headnotes. In this case, the copyrighted material involved those headnotes, which are “summaries of specific points of law addressed in a particular case, drafted by Westlaw Attorney Editors.”
Ross had earlier claimed its use of the headnotes as “innocent infringement,” which Judge Bibas dismissed on Tuesday, stating that Westlaw’s headnotes clearly bear a copyright notice.
The judge also dismissed Ross’ fair use defense on Westlaw’s headnotes, considering four factors: the use of the copyrighted work, commercial or nonprofit; the nature of the copyrighted work; and “how Ross’s use affected the copyrighted work’s value or potential market.”
Judge Bibas’ decision on the four factors was split 2-2 between the two firms. However, he added that the fourth factor outweighed the rest, and since Ross used the copyrighted content to build a competitor, it violated the law.
While this is a landmark ruling in AI copyright lawsuits, Bibas noted that Ross’s product was not generative AI. The case pertains to “copying written words” without permission.
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Still, it comes as multiple AI companies are facing lawsuits from publishers that claim their work was scraped without permission to train large language models (LLMs). The most notable one is The New York Times’ copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft. News Corp. has also sued Perplexity, while several large Canadian news organizations sued OpenAI.
Other publishers have opted to sign content-sharing deals rather than fight it out in court. Vox Media and The Atlantic have a deal with OpenAI, while Axios has a partnership with Meta.
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