Thomson Reuters wins the first major US AI copyright ruling against fair use, in a case filed in May 2020 against legal research AI startup Ross Intelligence
The Thomson Reuters decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders.
For Thomson Reuters, the result reinforces the strategic value of authoritative legal content as legal-research products are upgraded with AI capabilities. For Ross Intelligence, it removes fair use as the defense accepted in this case.
First-order effects
Thomson Reuters gains a favorable copyright ruling against Ross Intelligence, strengthening its position in protecting the legal-research material at issue.
Ross Intelligence faces the immediate consequence of a rejected fair-use defense in the litigation, while rights holders gain a closely watched result to cite in negotiations and disputes.
Second-order effects
AI developers working with proprietary, curated databases will face greater pressure to document data provenance and consider licenses rather than rely solely on a fair-use position.
Legal-information providers can use the decision to differentiate products built on controlled, authoritative corpora, raising the value of content rights alongside model capabilities.
Third-order effects
If similar rulings accumulate, AI development may shift toward governed, licensed datasets and away from treating high-value reference collections as broadly reusable training inputs.
The outcome underscores that copyright risk may develop case by case: it strengthens rights holders’ bargaining position without by itself resolving fair use for every generative-AI use.
The trend: AI competition is increasingly being shaped by control of rights-cleared, professionally curated data as well as by model performance.
Key to the ruling: Ross took the works of Reuters and built a directly-competing product that was not very transformative. — I doubt the same ruling will occur in, for example, the NYT v. OpenAI suit. — [Judge] Bibas...ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by develop…
First AI fair use ruling, but probably of little predictive value for the big pending genAI cases, as it involved an AI developer that copied Westlaw headnotes to train a legal research model to directly compete with Westlaw (at least that's how the court describes it). [embedde…
This case wasn't about generative AI, so it isn't as useful to killing the hallucinating plagiarism machines as it could be. — That said, the fact that so many of the AI company's bullshit arguments were able to be dealt with on summary judgment* is pretty interesting. [embedd…
The big takeaway here is that Reuters won this case against the AI company on grounds they violated fair use—the judge found the AI company was guilty because, in using copyrighted works to generate its output, it “meant to compete... by developing a market substitute.” — Huge.…
This is a pretty big deal. However, what was scraped is a paywalled service that lawyers use and costs a small fortune to subscribe to. That means it's not necessarily applicable to your average website - but it's a start. — https://www.wired.com/...
In the first US legal decision on whether AI training is ‘fair use’, delivered today, the judge ruled against the AI company. Their copying was not fair use. 🎉 The paragraph below is huge, and could give a sense of what's coming in other ongoing cases. Two parts in particular: [i…
3/ The Court determined that two key #fairuse factors, the purpose of the use and its market impact, weighed against ROSS. The judge emphasized that ROSS could have created its own content without infringing on Westlaw's copyrights.
3/ For AI companies, the days of “we're just training on it, not copying it” may be numbered. This decision makes it clear that courts will scrutinize whether AI models are being built on copyrighted works without permission. The old argument that training data is mere “input” …
4/ The free-for-all days of AI data collection are ending. With courts treating editorial compilations as protectable intellectual property, AI developers have two choices: forge legitimate licensing agreements or spend a fortune litigating. More likely, we'll see an industry s…
4/ Additionally, the Court ruled that Westlaw's headnotes met the originality requirement for copyright protection due to their creative synthesis and explanation of legal opinions. This decision revises a 2023 ruling where Judge Bibas had largely denied Thomson Reuters' motions.
5/ While the ruling resolves several issues, some questions remain for trial, such as whether certain copyrights have expired or if ROSS copied Westlaw's Key Number System. ROSS ceased operations in 2021 due to litigation costs, but Thomson Reuters continues to seek damages.
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US | The Thomson Reuters decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders.
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US | The Thomson Reuters decision has big implications for the battle between generative AI companies and rights holders