Thomson Reuters wins an early court battle over AI, copyright, and fair use

Feb 12, 2025 06:58 AM - 1 month ago 50785

On Tuesday, US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas issued a partial summary judgement successful favour of Thomson Reuters successful its copyright infringement suit against Ross Intelligence, a ineligible AI startup. Filed successful 2020, it’s 1 of the first cases that will woody pinch the legality of AI devices and really they are trained, often utilizing copyrighted information scraped from location other without licence aliases permission.

Similar lawsuits against OpenAI, Microsoft, and different AI giants are presently winding their measurement done the courts, and they could travel down to akin questions astir whether aliases not the AI devices tin declare a “fair use” defense of utilizing copyrighted material.

In a connection fixed to The Verge by Thomson Reuters spokesperson Jeff McCoy, the institution said:

We are pleased that the tribunal granted summary judgement successful our favour and concluded that Westlaw’s editorial contented created and maintained by our lawyer editors, is protected by copyright and cannot beryllium utilized without our consent. The copying of our contented was not “fair use.”

However, arsenic the judge noted, this lawsuit progressive “non-generative” AI, not a generative AI instrumentality for illustration an LLM. Ross unopen down successful 2021, calling the suit “spurious” but saying it was incapable to raise capable backing to support going while caught up successful a ineligible battle.

As reported antecedently by Wired, coming Judge Bibas wrote successful his decision, “None of Ross’s imaginable defenses holds water” against accusations of copyright infringement, and yet rejected Ross’s fair-use defense, relying heavy connected the facet of really Ross’s usage of copyrighted worldly affected the marketplace for the original work’s worth by building a nonstop competitor.

Thomson Reuters sued complete Ross’s usage of its Westlaw hunt engine. Westlaw indexes a bully woody of worldly that is not copyrightable (like ineligible decisions) but besides intersperses it pinch its ain content. For instance, Westlaw headnotes — which are summaries of points of rule written by quality editors — are a signature characteristic meant to make the very costly Westlaw subscription charismatic to lawyers.

In building a ineligible investigation hunt engine, Ross turned the annotations and headnotes “into numerical information astir the relationships among ineligible words to provender into its AI,” wrote Bibas. The ruling describes how, aft Thomson Reuters rejected its effort to licence Westlaw’s content, Ross turned to different company, LegalEase, and purchased 25,000 Bulk Memos of questions and answers written by lawyers utilizing the Westlaw headnotes that it utilized for training data.

Ross CEO Andrew Arruda claimed the Westlaw information was “added noise” and that its instrumentality “aims to admit and extract answers straight from the rule utilizing instrumentality learning.” However, aft having “compared really akin each of the 2,830 Bulk Memo questions, headnotes, and judicial opinions are, 1 by one,” the judge said the grounds of existent copying was “so evident that nary reasonable assemblage could find otherwise.”

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