A US federal appeals court ruled on 29 September that ROSS Intelligence's use of Westlaw's headnotes to train an AI legal-research tool was not fair use [1].
The Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed a District of Delaware ruling for Thomson Reuters, which owns Westlaw. It held that 2,243 headnotes were original enough for copyright protection [1].
"Under ROSS's framing, this case appears to concern the future of AI legal technology," the court wrote. "In truth, this is no more than an ordinary copyright case" [1].
What it covers
ROSS built a search engine that answered legal questions with passages from judicial opinions. A contractor wrote about 25,000 training memos for it, using Westlaw headnotes to frame the questions [1].
The court found ROSS's use "minimally transformative, at best," because ROSS and Westlaw used the headnotes for the same purpose: a legal-research platform [1].
It also found harm in "the market for licensing headnotes as text to train AI," which it called "rapidly developing." ROSS took Thomson Reuters's chance to license them, the court said [1].
Three of the four fair-use factors weighed against ROSS; the second, the nature of the work, weighed slightly in its favour [1].
What it does not tell you
Whether training chatbots is fair use. "ROSS's AI was not a generative AI," the court said. It distinguished the claims made for systems that "generate original responses" in other cases, including the pending suits against OpenAI [1].
How the case ends. This was an early appeal on two questions the lower court sent up: originality and fair use. The rest of the case continues there [1].
Whether it binds other courts. It is the law in the Third Circuit only [1].
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