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The win is likely to impact the many other AI battles currently raging on between GenAI companies and copyright holders.
Canadian technology company Thomson Reuters has won a favourable partial summary judgement against AI start-up Ross Intelligence in a copyright infringement lawsuit. In 2020, the parent company of news agency Reuters accused Ross Intelligence of unlawfully copying and using content from its Westlaw platform to train its AI models.
Thomson Reuters said Ross Intelligence made use of its Westlaw search engine which indexes material that is not copyrightable, for example legal decisions and also intersperses it with its own content. Reportedly, headnotes were copied to create bulk memos, which were then used by Ross Intelligence to train an AI-powered legal research tool.
In 2023, US circuit judge Stephanos Bibas denied Thomson Reuters a summary judgement, stating that fair use and infringement were issues to be considered by a jury, however, he has now revised his ruling, disallowing fair use as a defense for training models on proprietary data without permission.
“In my 2023 opinion, I denied summary judgment on fair use,” Judge Bibas wrote. “But with new information and understanding, I vacate those sections of that order and its accompanying opinion addressing fair use. Fair use is an affirmative defense, so Ross bears the burden of proof.
“A smart man knows when he is right, a wise man knows when he is wrong. Wisdom does not always find me, so I try to embrace it when it does, even if it comes late, as it did here.”
Though the ruling is significant, some issues will still be contested at trial.
Since the creation of generative AI (GenAI), issues of copyright and infringement have been a topic of contention between technology companies, artists and content creators and Thomson Reuters’ victory may well impact how current lawsuits proceed. For example, in 2023 the New York Times launched a legal battle against OpenAI and Microsoft for alleged copyright infringement and that case is ongoing.
The publication claims that AI chatbots made by these companies are trained on millions of articles published by The New York Times. The media outlet also claims that it now competes with these chatbots as a source of reliable information.
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