Key takeaways
- In the first AI fair use decision, the court rejected the fair use defense in the context of AI training data.
- Key factors in the determination included that the defendant’s use was not transformative and that it created a tool to directly compete with the plaintiffs.
- Businesses providing and using AI should continue to be cautious about using copyrighted data and examine the impact of this decision in the specific context of the AI tool at issue.
The United States District Court for Delaware rejected a fair use defense to the use of copyrighted works to train a natural language processing AI system in a decision that can have significant implications for providers and users of AI products and services. This decision highlights the copyright infringement risks of using third-party materials to train, develop, improve or operate AI tools. However, this case remains only one of many between rights owners, model developers and the AI ecosystem, and the facts and particularities of the technology at issue may change how this decision impacts other cases.
Background
Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence (Ross) alleging that Ross infringed its copyrights where Ross used Thomson Reuters’s Westlaw headnotes to train Ross’s new AI legal-research search engine. Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw, a prominent legal research platform that includes legal materials and editorial content, like headnotes, that summarize key points of law and case holdings and is organized using the “Key Number System,” both of which Thomson Reuters claims as its copyrighted material. Notably, Ross first sought to license Westlaw’s content to train its AI system, but Thomson Reuters refused because Ross was its direct competitor. Ross then turned to a legal analytics company, LegalEase, to compile AI training data in the form of “Bulk Memos.” These Bulk Memos are lawyers’ compilations of various legal questions with good and bad answers. To create its Bulk Memos, LegalEase gave each contributing lawyer a guide explaining how to create those legal questions using Westlaw headnotes, although the same instructions stated that headnotes should not be copied and pasted directly into the questions. LegalEase then sold those Bulk Memos to Ross, which Ross ultimately used to train its AI search engine tool.
