In his summary judgment, Bibas said that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” and ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters on the issue of “fair use.” The “fair use” doctrine of U.S. laws allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.
The media and technology company filed a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence — a now-defunct legal research firm — in 2020, arguing they had used materials from Thomson Reuters' own legal platform Westlaw to train an AI model without permission.
Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Tuesday that affirmed Ross Intelligence was not permitted under U.S. copyright law to use the company’s content in order to build a competing platform.
What links each of these cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works.
Thomson Reuters' win comes as a growing number of lawsuits have been filed by authors, visual artists and music labels against developers of AI models over similar issues.
