LOS ANGELES — Thomson Reuters has secured a significant victory in a legal dispute concerning the fair use of copyrighted material in the realm of artificial intelligence.
In 2020, the company initiated legal action against Ross Intelligence, a now-closed legal research firm, accusing it of using content from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw platform to train its AI models without obtaining proper authorization.
Recent news from the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, presided over by Judge Stephanos Bibas, confirmed that Ross Intelligence was not allowed to utilize Thomson Reuters’ material to develop a competing platform in accordance with U.S. copyright law.
Neither Thomson Reuters nor Ross Intelligence has publicly commented on the latest ruling.
Judge Bibas stated in his ruling that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water,” affirming Thomson Reuters’ stance regarding the concept of “fair use.” In U.S. law, the “fair use” doctrine permits limited utilization of copyrighted works for purposes such as education, research, or for the transformation of said works into different formats.
This victory for Thomson Reuters arrives amidst a rising tide of litigation from authors, visual artists, and music labels targeting developers of artificial intelligence models over analogous copyright issues.
Central to these disputes is the accusation that tech companies have collected vast quantities of human-generated texts to train conversational AI systems, facilitating the generation of text that closely resembles human writing, all without seeking permission or providing compensatory arrangements to the original creators.
Prominent companies like OpenAI, in collaboration with Microsoft, are facing similar copyright claims from various authors, including notable figures such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult, and George R. R. Martin, the writer behind the “Game of Thrones” series.
Additionally, media organizations like The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Mother Jones have also filed suits in this context, further highlighting the ongoing conflict regarding the use of copyrighted material in AI training.
