Now the AI companies are allegedly nicking content from the Lii’s – Caseway boss says it’s not true officer…
It raises the question.. have the other Lii’s around the world be raided by legal AI companies and if so what can they do about it. Austlii the first Lii has spent shedloads of cash over the last 35 odd years building its tech and editorial . Can Lii’s even afford expensive court outings. This I’d suggest is going to be a bigger story than it initially looks as a lot of Lii money comes from government.
Law Next reports
The Canadian Legal Information Institute, a nonprofit organization that is a major provider of free legal research in Canada, has sued a recently launched AI-powered legal research site called Caseway, alleging that it has unlawfully taken CanLII’s cases in order to build its own system.
But the founder of Caseway, Alistair Vigier, says the allegations are patently false and that his company has not used any data owned or enhanced by CanLII.
HERE’S THE SITE – I HAVE TO SAY I CHUCKLED AT THE PROMPT ON THE RIGHT
“Our AI models use only the pure text directly from court records without modifications or value-added enhancements,” Vigier said. “In fact, prior to the lawsuit, we even included links to CanLII so users could cross-reference the cases for accuracy, which may have caused confusion about how our AI works.”
In Canada, court documents are public records. But in its notice of civil claim filed on Nov. 4, CanLII contends that it holds a copyright on its cases by virtue of the work it puts into enhancing them in order to make them more easily searchable.
“CanLII expends significant time, resources and expertise to review, analyze, curate, aggregate, catalogue, annotate, index and otherwise enhance the Data prior to publishing its original work product … on the CanLII Website,” its lawsuit states.
It makes those cases available to the public subject to a set of terms and conditions set out in its terms of use which, among other things, prohibit the systematic or bulk downloading of its legal materials.
CanLII alleges that Caseway, an Irish company that just launched its Canadian legal research assistant in September, violated these terms and conditions by systematically scraping and downloading materials from its website.
CanLII claims that, on Oct. 3, it was alerted that its cases were found in an open source search engine on a host with an IP address associated with Caseway. While CanLII acknowledges that “a full investigation of the incident is ongoing,” and that “full particulars … are solely within the knowledge and control of the Defendants,” it alleges that the copied works constitute over 120 gigabytes of data and 3.5 million records.
