Reuters Wins AI Copyright Case
Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the United States. In 2020, the media and technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thomson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor, finding that the company’s copyright was indeed infringed by Ross Intelligence’s actions.
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Notably, Judge Bibas ruled in Thomson Reuters’ favor on the question of fair use. The fair use doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves against claims that they used copyrighted materials illegally. The idea underpinning fair use is that sometimes it’s legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission—for example, to create parody works, or in noncommercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work (whether it’s poetry, nonfiction, private letters, et cetera), the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use impacts the market value of the original. Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”
Previously:
- OpenAI Failed to Deliver Opt-out Tool
- Microsoft’s Suleyman on AI Scraping
- AI Companies Ignoring Robots.txt
- Alexa Copyright Violations
- The New York Times Sues OpenAI
- Suing OpenAI and Meta for Copyright Infringement
- GitHub Copilot and Copyright
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Thomson Reuters. It was content from Westlaw, their legal database stuff, not Reuters their news agency.
This is great news! I hope every creative whose work was stolen by these AI grifters gets a big payout. It was piracy on a scale never seen before
