A federal judge in Delaware ruled on Tuesday that Ross Intelligence, a former competitor of Thomson Reuters, violated U.S. copyright law by copying the company’s content to build a competing AI-based legal platform.
The decision by U.S. Circuit Judge Stephanos Bibas marks the first U.S. ruling on the key issue of fair use in AI-related copyright disputes.
Fair use allows certain unauthorized uses of copyrighted works under specific conditions. This defense has been crucial for tech giants like OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta in defending against lawsuits from authors, artists, and other content creators who argue that their works are being used without permission to train AI systems.
While tech companies argue that AI systems rely on fair use to study and generate new content, copyright holders argue that this process undermines their work and threatens their income.
A spokesperson for Thomson Reuters expressed satisfaction with the ruling. “We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and affirmed that Westlaw’s editorial content is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent,” the spokesperson said. “The copying of our content was not ‘fair use.'”
Thomson Reuters is the parent company of Reuters News.
Attorneys for Ross Intelligence did not respond immediately to requests for comment.
Judge Bibas initially ruled that a jury should decide whether fair use applied to the case, but he reconsidered his stance after reviewing the case materials. “I studied the case materials more closely and realized that my prior summary-judgment ruling had not gone far enough,” Bibas explained on Tuesday. However, he added that a jury would still need to consider the underlying issues of the case.
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