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A federal judge ruled that an AI firm that created a legal platform by scraping content created by info-tech company Thomson Reuters — which has a paywalled platform for users to access info regarding things like case law, law journals, and regulations — is in breach of copyright infringement.
The Big Picture: While a copyright-infringement case concerning a conglomerate mostly focused on legal, tax, and accounting advice may not seem very splashy, it’s the first major ruling on AI training… and one that strikes at the heart of Silicon Valley’s business plans. Expect this esoteric case to become the foundation for lawsuits from the entertainment, media, and art industries.
Behind the Ruling: US District Judge Stephanos Bibas dropped a hammer on the AI industry.
- He ruled that the Y Combinator-backed AI firm Ross, which has already shuttered, wasn’t protected by the “fair use” exception for copyrighted material when it used content from Thomson Reuters to make its platform.
- That’s because Ross explicitly trained its own legal research platform on Reuters’ copyrighted “headnotes” — summaries of a legal opinion.
- Bibas says that headnotes “introduce creativity by distilling, synthesizing, or explaining part of an opinion.” In his opinion, he believes these “original works” are protected from AI training that repurposes them for commercial use.
The Future: The commercial-use aspect is critical to Bibas’ ruling. He said that Ross’ desire to profit off of the copyrighted content actually “disfavors fair use” — a precedent set forth by the ruling in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, which said fair-use needed to be weighed against the “commercial nature of the use.” The more money to be made from the “transformed” work, the higher the threshold for the fair-use doctrine.
The Thomson Reuters ruling is already having an effect — Concord Music Group, which is suing Anthropic for using copyrighted song lyrics to train its Claude chatbot, requested that the federal judge assigned to the case take note of the decision.
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