Written by: Aruni Soni, IP Reporter
Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH convinced a federal judge an AI-powered legal tool’s ingestion of its data isn’t “fair use” under copyright law.
Judge Stephanos Bibas rejected Ross Intelligence Inc.’s fair-use defense because two of the four fair use factors—the purpose of Ross’s use of headnotes from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw legal research service and its harm to the market for the originals—favor Thomson Reuters, according to the opinion filed Tuesday in the US District Court for the District of Delaware.
Bibas partially granted summary judgment on Thomson Reuters’ direct copyright infringement claims on more than 2,000 headnotes, leaving open the factual question whether copyright protection has expired for any of them. He left the question of whether another more than 5,000 headnotes were infringed to a jury at an upcoming trial.
The lawsuit, filed in 2020, was one of the first copyright cases alleging infringement through the development of AI products. The fair-use defense is central to a pile of copyright lawsuits brought by authors, publishers, and others from creative industries against companies including OpenAI Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. over their AI models. While those lawsuits concern generative AI models—different from the AI tool Ross developed—Bibas’ opinion serves as an early bellwether for how the different fair use factors may be evaluated in the context of AI.
