LawSites reports that the Third Circuit affirmed partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters against ROSS Intelligence, holding that Westlaw’s 2,243 headnotes are copyrightable and that using them to train a competing legal research product was not fair use. The panel is the first federal appeals court to rule on fair use for AI training, and it read the intermediate-copying cases such as Google v. Oracle, Sega, and Sony narrowly, saying code was copied there only because it was necessary to reach unprotected functional aspects, and that “ease is not a justification for copying.” A footnote confines the holding to non-generative systems and leaves generative models for another case, and ROSS said it will seek Supreme Court review.
Third Circuit rules AI training on Westlaw headnotes is not fair use
LawSites reports that the Third Circuit affirmed partial summary judgment for Thomson Reuters against ROSS Intelligence, holding that Westlaw's 2,243 headnotes are copyrightable and that using them to train a competing legal research product was not fair use. The panel is the first federal appeals court to rule on fair use for AI training, and it read the intermediate-copying cases such as Google v. Oracle, Sega, and Sony narrowly, saying code was copied there only because it was necessary to reach unprotected functional aspects, and that "ease is not a justification for copying." A footnote confines the holding to non-generative systems and leaves generative models for another case, and ROSS said it will seek Supreme Court review.
Source: Lawnext