Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US
187 comments
·February 11, 2025JackC
Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721...
The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model that helps lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. In that specific instance the court says this plan isn't fair use. If it was fair use, one could presumably just pay people to translate headnotes directly and make a Westlaw competitor, since translating headnotes is cheaper than writing new ones. And conversely if it isn't fair use where's the harm (the court notes no copyright violation was necessary for interoperability for example) -- one can still pay people to write fresh headnotes from caselaw and create the same training set.
The court emphasizes "Because the AI landscape is changing rapidly, I note for readers that only non-generative AI is before me today." But I'm not sure "generative" is that meaningful a distinction here.
You can definitely see how AI companies will be hustling to distinguish this from "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents." It's not quite the same, the connection is less direct, but it's not totally different.
anon373839
This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time.
One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote from a case to represent that case’s holding on an issue. After all, we would expect many lawyers analyzing the case independently to converge on the same quotes!
The key fact underlying all of this, I think, is that when Ross paid human annotators to write their own versions of the headnotes, they really did crib from West’s wholesale rather than doing their own independent analysis. Source text was paraphrased using curiously similar language to West’s paraphrasing. That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision.
The case has very little to say about the more commonly posed question of whether copyright is infringed in large-scale language modeling.
AnthonyMouse
> That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision.
The "competing product" thing is probably the most extreme part of this opinion.
The most important fair use factor is if the use competes with the original work, but this is generally implied to be directly competes, i.e. if you translate someone else's book from English to French and want to sell the translation, the translation is going to be in direct competition for sales to people who speak both English and French. The customer is going to use the copy claiming fair use as a direct substitute for the original work, instead of buying it.
This court is trying to extend that to anything downstream from it, which seems crazy. For example, "multiple copies for classroom use" is one of the explicit examples of fair use from the copyright statute, but schools are obviously teaching people intending to go into competition with the original author, and in general the idea that you can't read something if you ever intend to write something to sell in competition with it seems absurd and in contradiction to the common practices in reverse engineering.
But this is also a district court opinion that isn't even binding on other courts, so we'll see what happens if it gets appealed.
mountainb
No that is not an extreme interpretation of the fair use factors. This is a routinely emphasized factor in fair use analyses for both copyright and trademark. School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Also, § 108 provides extensive protections for libraries and archives that go beyond fair use doctrines.
The idea that the schools are encouraging the students to compete with the original authors of works taught in the classroom is fanciful by the meaning that courts usually apply to competition. Your example is different from this case in which Ross wanted to compete in the same market against West offering a similar service at a lower price. Another reason that the schools get a carveout is because it would make most education impractical without each school obtaining special licenses for public performance for every work referenced in the classroom.
But maybe that also provokes the question as to if schools really deserve that kind of sweetheart treatment (a massive indirect subsidy), or does it over-privileges formal schools relative to the commons at large?
DrScientist
The case looks pretty straightforward to me - they copied the notes ( human or machine doesn't really matter ) to directly compete with the author of the notes.
If you wrote a program that automatically rephrased an original text - something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica - to preserve the meaning but not have identical phrasing - and then sold access to that information on in a way that undercut the original - then in my view that's clearly ripping off the original creators of the Encyclopedia and would likely stop people writing new versions of the encyclopedia in the future if such activity was allowed.
These laws are there to make sure that valuable activities continue to happen and are not stopped because of theft. We need textbooks, we need journalistic articles - to get these requires people to be paid to work on them.
I think it's entirely reasonable to say that an LLM is such a program - and if used on sources which are sustained by having paid people work on them, and then the reformatted content is sold on in a way to under cut the original activity then that's a theft that's clearly damaging society.
I see LLM's as simply a different way to access the underlying content - the rules of the underlying content should still apply - ChatGPTs revenues are predicted to be in the billions this year - sending some of that to content creators, so that content continues to be produced, is not just right - it's in their interest.
bryanrasmussen
I think that someone taking Biology 101 and ending up writing textbooks, as opposed to all the other people who just forgot what they learned once the elective was over or ended up working biologists with labs or teachers of biology and so forth, is quite different than someone saying hey I want to make a competing product to this successful company, let's take their content, re-write and use AI to make a competitor, and then actually going into direct competition with that company a couple years later
pigbearpig
" court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim"
That is the opposite of the ruling. The judge said the ones that summarize and pick out the important parts are copyrightable and specifically excludes the headnotes that quote court opinion verbatim.
The judge:
"But I am still not granting summary judgment on any headnotes that are verbatim copies of the case opinion (for reasons that I explain below)"
anon373839
You're right as far as the MSJ is concerned, and I should've been more precise. I was focusing on the dictum in the preceding paragraph (because we're discussing the broader implications of the order rather than the nuts-and-bolts of the instant motion). In that paragraph, the judge wrote:
> More than that, each headnote is an individual, copyrightable work. That became clear to me once I analogized the lawyer’s editorial judgment to that of a sculptor. A block of raw marble, like a judicial opinion, is not copyrightable. Yet a sculptor creates a sculpture by choosing what to cut away and what to leave in place. That sculpture is copyrightable. 17 U.S.C. §102(a)(5). So too, even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole. Identifying which words matter and chiseling away the surrounding mass expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is. That editorial expression has enough “creative spark” to be original. ... So all headnotes, even any that quote judicial opinions verbatim, have original value as individual works.
I personally don't think this sculpture metaphor works for verbatim quotes from judicial opinions.
bee_rider
> It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote from a case to represent that case’s holding on an issue. After all, we would expect many lawyers analyzing the case independently to converge on the same quotes!
I guess it depends on how long the source is, and how long the collection of quotes is, if we’d expect multiple lawyers to converge on the same solution. I don’t think it is totally obvious, though…
I’m also not sure if that’s a generally good test. It seems great for, like, painting. But I wouldn’t be surprised if we could come up with a photography scene where most professionals would converge on the same shot…
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zozbot234
If close paraphrase can be detected, this ought to be proof enough that some non-trivial element of creativity was involved in the original text. Because purely functional and necessary elements are not protected by copyright, even when they would otherwise be creative (this is technically known as the 'scenes à faire' case) - and surely a "quote" which is unavoidable because it factually and unquestionably is the core of the ruling would have to fall under that.
DrScientist
Isn't the argument that the act of selecting the right quote is the real work - and the work the copier avoided in the act of copying?
You could argue that all the words are already in the dictionary - so none of them are new, you are just quoting from the dictionary in a particular order......
The reason you have people, rather than computers interpreting the law, is you can make judgements that make sense. Fundamentally these laws are there to protect work being unfairly ripped off.
What was clearly done in this case was a rip-off which damaged the original creator - everything else is dancing on the head of a pin.
fncypants
I think this is the best takeaway. This case and its outcome is restricted to its facts. Most of the LLM activity today is very different than what happened here.
singleshot_
My experience using Westlaw Keycites at work is that they’re not primarily created by fishing a quote out of a holding, but instead by synthesizing a rule. If I want a summary, I read the Keycite; if I want a money quote, I root around in the case linked to the Keycite.
Have you seen different? I’m curious what area of law you practice and in what state, for comparison’s sake.
anon373839
Yeah, I'd agree that most are synthesized. But I do frequently see headnotes that are verbatim or nearly verbatim slices from the text. Just grabbing a case at random: Kearney v. Salomon Smith Barney, Inc., 39 Cal.4th 95 (2006). The 4th headnote reads:
> The federal system contemplates that individual states may adopt distinct policies to protect their own residents and generally may apply those policies to businesses that choose to conduct business within that state.
And the opinion reads:
> [T]he federal system contemplates that individual states may adopt distinct policies to protect their own residents and generally may apply those policies to businesses that choose to conduct business within that state.
6stringmerc
The crux is Fair Use and until lobbyists change the four factor test, AI training has an uphill battle in court. It’s a very disliked observation in this forum, but I stand by my principles on this one because the courts see it my way. Derivative works, especially by artificial means, simply fail the test miserably and that’s the truth.
reissbaker
I'll quote a longer portion of the transcript about generative AI, because I think it makes the opposite of your point:
Ross’s use is not transformative. Transformativeness is about the purpose of the use. “If an original work and a secondary use share the same or highly similar purposes, and the second use is of a commercial nature, the first factor is likely to weigh against fair use, absent some other justification for copying.” Warhol, 598 U.S. at 532–33. It weighs against fair use here. Ross’s use is not transformative because it does not have a “further purpose or different character” from Thomson Reuters’s. Id. at 529.
Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw. It is undisputed that Ross’s AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new content itself). Rather, when a user enters a legal question, Ross spits back relevant judicial opinions that have already been written. D.I. 723 at 5. That process resembles how Westlaw uses headnotes and key numbers to return a list of cases with fitting headnotes.
I think it's quite relevant that this was not generative AI: the reason that mattered is that "transformative" use biases towards Fair Use exemptions from copyright. However, this wasn't creating new content or giving people a new way to understand the data: it was just used in a search engine, much like Westlaw provided a legal search engine. The judge is pointing out that the exact implementation details of a search engine don't grant Fair Use.
This doesn't make a ruling about generative AI, but I think it's a pretty meaningful distinction: writing new content seems much more "transformative" (in a literal sense: the old content is being used to create new content) than simply writing a similar search engine, albeit one with a better search algorithm.
BoorishBears
I came here to point this out, and it's especially clear if you contextualize this with the original decision from September: https://www.ded.uscourts.gov/sites/ded/files/opinions/20-613...
They were doing semantic search using embeddings/rerankers.
The point that reading both decisions together compounds is that if they had trained a model on the Bulk Memos and generated novel text instead of doing direct searches, there likely would have been enough indirection introduced to prevent a summary judgement and this would have gone to a jury as the September decision states.
In other words, from their comment:
> But I'm not sure "generative" is that meaningful a distinction here.
The judge would not seem to agree at all.
qingcharles
Westlaw's headnotes are primarily just snippets of the case with tags attached. They are really crappy. I hate them. Some lawyers love them.
Westlaw protects them because they are the "value add." Otherwise their business model is "take published decisions the court is legally bound to provide for free and sell it to you."
An LLM today could easily recreate the headnotes in a far superior manner from scratch with the right prompt. I don't even think hallucinations would factor in on such a small task that was well regulated, but you can always just asterisk the headnotes and put a disclaimer on them.
Tteriffic
Exactly. Why use the headnotes at all?
I always thought they were obviously were copyrightable. Plus they’re not close to perfect either.
AlexCoventry
> You can definitely see how AI companies will be hustling to distinguish this from "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents." It's not quite the same, the connection is less direct, but it's not totally different.
Surely creating a general-purpose AI is transformative, though? Are you anticipating that AI companies will be sued for contributory infringement, because customers are using a general-purpose AI to compete with companies which created parts of the training data?
llamaimperative
IMO yes. The entire purpose of copyright law is to protect the incentive to create new material. A huge portion of the value prop of AI is that it captures the incentive normally bound for the creators of the training material (i.e. the whole point is you can ask the AI and not even see, never mind pay, the originator).
zozbot234
Ask the AI for what exactly? Factual information? That gets very low protection from a copyright point of view, especially when separate random answers by the AI will routinely show completely different rephrasings of the AI's response - implying that it can generalize well beyond the "expression" contained in any single answer, and effectively reference the underlying facts.
AlexCoventry
I'm not a lawyer, but I think the bar for contributory infringement is much higher than that. I think you'd have to find representatives of the defendants actually indicating somehow that people should use it that way. It seems to me that Grokster, etc.'s encouragement of their users to infringe copyright was an important factor in them losing this case, for instance.
Ajedi32
Interestingly, almost the entirety of the judge's opinion seems to be focused on the question of whether the translated notes are subject to copyright. It seems to completely ignore the question of whether training an AI on copyrighted material constitutes making a copy of that work in the first place. Am I missing something?
The judge does note that no copyrighted material was distributed to users, because the AI doesn't output that information:
> There is no factual dispute: Ross’s output to an end user does not include a West headnote. What matters is not “the amount and substantiality of the portion used in making a copy, but rather the amount and substantiality of what is thereby made accessible to a public for which it may serve as a competing substitute.” Authors Guild, 804 F.3d at 222 (internal quotation marks omitted). Because Ross did not make West headnotes available to the public, Ross benefits from factor three.
But he only does so as part of an analysis of whether there's a valid fair use defense for Ross's copying of the head notes, ignoring the obvious (to me) point that if no copyrighted material was distributed to end users, how can this even be a violation of copyright in the first place?
unyttigfjelltol
Ross evidently copied and used the text himself. It's like Ross creating an unauthorized volume of West's books, perhaps with a twist.
Obscurity ≠ legal compliance.
Ajedi32
So the use of AI actually has nothing to do with the ruling here? This is just about the fact that Ross made one local copy of the notes and never distributed it?
brookst
How would training on copyrighted material be infringement in a way that merely producing the training material (but not iterating through training) would not be?
kevin_thibedeau
There were data brokers who literally paid people to transcribe phone books before OCR was a viable option. That was protected, as data isn't copyrightable. It isn't hard to argue that case law metadata is no different even though it includes textual descriptions (themselves taken from public documents).
musicale
> "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents"
This is a good distillation. A bit like "we trained our system on various works of art and music, and now it is being sold as a service that competes with the original artists and musicians."
bsder
AI has yet to demonstrate that it can do anything different from what a group of people could sit down and do. Sure, the AI may be able to do it faster, but there hasn't yet been anything demonstrated that exceeds what humans can do.
If it would be illegal for a group of people to do something, it is also going to be illegal for an AI do so.
Why is that so surprising?
veggieroll
> Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.”
Yep. That's what people have been saying all along. If the intent is to substitute the original, then copying is not fair use.
But the problem is that the current method for training requires this volume of data. So the models are legitimately not viable without massive copyright infringement.
It'll be interesting to see how a defendant with a larger wallet will fare. But this doesn't look good.
Though big-picture, it seems to me that the money-ed interests will ensure that even if the current legal landscape doesn't allow LLM's to exist, then they will lobby HARD until it is allowed. This is inevitable now that it's at least partially framed in national security terms.
But I'd hope that this means there is a chance that if models have to train on all of human content, the weights will be available for free to all humans. If it requires massive copyright infringement on our content, we should all have an ownership stake in the resulting models.
johnnyanmac
>But the problem is that the current method for training requires this volume of data. So the models are legitimately not viable without massive copyright infringement.
Sure it is. It just requires what every other copyright'd work needs: permission and stipulations from the copyright holder. These aren't small time bloggers on the internet, these are large scale businesses.
>Though big-picture, it seems to me that the money-ed interests will ensure that even if the current legal landscape doesn't allow LLM's to exist, then they will lobby HARD until it is allowed.
The only solace I take is that these conglomerates are paying a lot to take down the rules they made 30 years ago when they weren't the ones profiting from stealing. But yes, I'm still frustrated by the hypocrisy.
Ukv
> Sure it is. It just requires what every other copyright'd work needs: permission and stipulations from the copyright holder.
Most other scenarios don't use millions/billions of works - that's the part which puts viability in question.
> these are large scale businesses.
I'd like training models to also remain accessible to open-source developers, academic researchers, and smaller businesses. Large-scale pretraining is common even for models that are not cutting-edge LLMs.
> The only solace I take is that these conglomerates are paying a lot to take down the rules they made 30 years ago when they weren't the ones profiting from stealing
As far as I'm aware, most of the lobbying in favor of stricter copyright has been done by Disney, Universal, Time Warner, RIAA, etc.
Not to say that tech companies have a consistent moral stance beyond whatever's currently in their financial self-interest, but I think that self-interest has put them in a position of supporting fair use and copyright safe harbors, opposing link tax, etc. more often than the the other way around - with cases like Authors Guild v. Google being a significant win for fair use.
johnnyanmac
>Most other scenarios don't use millions/billions of works - that's the part which puts viability in question.
Yes, they do. We have acquisitions in the billions these days and exclusivity deals in the hundreds of millions. Let's not pretend these companies can't do this through normal channels. They just wanna steal because they think they can get away from it.
>I'd like training models to also remain accessible to open-source developers, academic researchers, and smaller businesses.
Same. But such models still need to be ethically sourced. Maybe there's not enough royalty free content to compete with OpenAI, but it's pretty clear from Deepseek that you don't need 82 TB of data to be effective. If we need that much data, there are clearly optimizations to be made.
>I think that self-interest has put them in a position of supporting fair use and copyright safe harbors,
Yet they will sue anytime their data is scraped or otherwise not making the money. Maybe they didn't put trillions into lobbying like others, but they definitely have their fair share od using copyright. Microsoft won a lawsuit against web scraping via LinkedIn less than a year before OpenAI fell into legal troubles over scraping the entire internet.
toyg
> the current method for training requires this volume of data
This is one of those things that signal how dumb this technology still is - or maybe how smart humans are when compared to machines. A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output.
I remember talking with friends 30 years ago about how it was inevitable that the brain would eventually be fully implemented as machine, once calculation power gets big enough; but it looks like we're still very far from that.
gregschlom
> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output.
Maybe not directly, but consider that our brains are the product of million of years of evolution and aren't a blank slate when we're born. Even though babies can't speak a language at birth, they already have all the neural connections in place in order to acquire and manipulate language, and require just a few years of "supervised fine tuning" to learn the actual language.
LLMs, on the other hand, start with their weights at random values and need to catch up with those million years of evolution first.
skeledrew
Add to this, the brain is constantly processing raw sensory data from the moment it became viable, even when the body is "sleeping". It's using orders of magnitude more data than any model in existence every moment, but isn't generally deemed "intelligent" enough until it's around 18 years old.
nitwit005
There can't be that much pre-built into the brain. There isn't that much dna, and only a portion of it can be going to the design of the brain.
A lot of what we're able to do has to be from some sort of generic capability.
johnnyanmac
sadly, those weights will not be inherited like they would to a baby. They'll be cooped up until the company dies, and that data probably dies with them. No wonder LLM has allegedly hit some stalls already.
dkjaudyeqooe
> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output.
> I remember talking with friends 30 years ago
I'd say you're pretty old. How many years of training did it take for you to start producing good output?
The leason here is we're kind of meta-trained: our minds are primed to pick up new things quickly by abstracting them and relating them to things we already know. We work in concepts and mental models rather than text. LLMs are incredibly weak by comparison. They only understand token sequences.
layer8
That's the point I think. It should be possible to require orders of magnitude less data to create an intelligence, and we are far from achieving that (including achieving AGI in the first place even with those huge amounts of data).
CobrastanJorji
We are unbelievably far from that. Everyone who tells you that we're within 20 years of emulating brains and says stuff like "the human brain only runs at 100 hertz!" has either been conned by a futurist or is in denial of their own mortality.
veggieroll
Absolutely! But the question is whether the next step-change in intelligence is just around the corner (in which case, this legal speedbump might spur innovation). Or, will the next revolution take a while.
There's enough money in the market to fund a lot of research into totally novel underlying methods. But if it takes too long, investors and lawmakers will just move to make what already works legal, because it is useful.
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Intralexical
> I remember talking with friends 30 years ago about how it was inevitable that the brain would eventually be fully implemented as machine, once calculation power gets big enough; but it looks like we're still very far from that.
Why would it be?
"It's inevitable that the Burj Khalifa gets built, once steel production gets high enough."
"It's inevitable that Pegasuses will be bred from horses, as soon as somebody collects enough oats."
Reducing intelligence to the bulk aggregate of brute "calculation power" is... Ironically missing the point of intelligence.
saulpw
> So the models are legitimately not viable without massive copyright infringement.
Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution. If I get a copy of Harry Potter from a dumpster, I can read it. If a company gets a copy of *all books from a torrent, they can use it to train their AI. The torrent providers may be in violation of copyright, and if the AI can be used to reproduce substantive portions of the original text, the AI companies then may be in violation of copyright, but simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement.
dkjaudyeqooe
> simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement
You can train a model on copyrighted text, you just can't distribute the output in any way without violating copyright. (edit: depending on the other fair use factors).
One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless of the form of the output. Just on those terms it is very likely to be a copyright violation. Even if they don't reproduce substantive portions, what they do reproduce is a derived work.
saulpw
If that mechanical process is not reversible, then it's not a copyright violation. For instance, I can compute the SHA256 hashes for every book in existence and distribute the resulting table of (ISBN, SHA256) and that is not a copyright violation.
gruez
>One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless of the form of the output. Just on those terms it is very likely to be a copyright violation. Even if they don't reproduce substantive portions, what they do reproduce is a derived work.
Google making thumbnails or scanning books are both arguably "mechanical". Both have been ruled as fair use.
aoanevdus
What’s a “mechanical process”? If I read The Lord of the Rings and it teaches me to write Star Wars, is that a mechanical process? My brain is governed by the laws of physics, right?
What if I’m a simulated brain running on a chip? What if I’m just a super-smart human and instead of reading and writing in the conventional way, I work out the LLM math in my head to generate the output?
cycomanic
That's an interesting take, but false in a lot of juristictions. Even if we ignore question of if the model can distribute work, in many places even downloading content is illegal. Otherwise the person torrenting a movie would be totally in the clear, or thing about what MS would say if a company "just" downloads copies of Windows to use on their computers without ever distributing them.
gruez
>Otherwise the person torrenting a movie would be totally in the clear
Any examples of people being sued for merely downloading? "Torrenting" basically always involves uploading, even if you stop immediately after completion. A better test would be if someone was sued for using an illegal streaming site, which to my knowledge has never happened.
veggieroll
I mean, you're right in the abstract. If you train an LLM in a void and never do anything with the model, sure.
But that's not what anyone is doing. People train models so that someone can actually use them. So I'm not sure how your comment is helpful other than to point out that distinction (which doesn't make much difference in this case specifically or how copyright applies for LLM's in general)
null
_DeadFred_
As long as someone give me the software software to run my business, that person might be in violation of copyright but I'm in the clear.
Simply running my business on illegally distributed copyrighted text/software/movie should not be copyright infringement.
layer8
If you buy a machine that prints copies of copyrighted books (built into the machine), and you use that machine and then distribute the resulting copies, and the machine didn't come with a license allowing you to do so, I'm pretty sure that you are liable as well.
At least some current AI providers, however, come with terms of service that promise that they will cover any such legal disputes for you.
itishappy
You might not be immediately liable, but that doesn't mean you're allowed to continue. I'd assume it's your duty to cease and desist immediately once it's pointed out that you're in violation.
tyfon
> Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution.
It would be interesting to see how this holds up in court.
"Your honor, I didn't watch the movie I downloaded, I only used it to train an AI."
I highly suspect it would not matter.
johnnyanmac
well I think that will be the final judgement. We'll treat training data more as distribution than as consumption. Things always get more complicated when you put stuff up for sale. I also can't necessarily get away with Making "Garry Botter" who got accepted into an Enchanter school and goes on adventures with Jon and Germione. Unless it's parody, you can only cut so close before you're just infringinng anyway despite making it legally distinct.
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blibble
> Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution. If I get a copy of Harry Potter from a dumpster, I can read it. If a company gets a copy of *all books from a torrent, they can use it to train their AI.
"a person reading" and "computer processing of data" (training) are not the same thing
MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc. rendered the verdict that loading unlicensed copyrighted material from disk was "copying", and hence copyright infringement
Animats
This isn't really about "AI". It's about copying summaries. Google was fined for this in France for copying news headlines into their search results, and now has to pay royalties in the EU. Westlaw is a summarizing and indexing service for court case results. It's been publishing that info in book form since 1872.
Ross was trying to compete with Westlaw, but used Westlaw as an input. West's "Key Numbers" are, after a century and a half, a de-facto standard.[2] So Ross had to match that proprietary indexing system to compete. Their output had to match Westlaw's rather closely. That's the underlying problem. The court ruled that the objective was to directly compete with Westlaw, and using Westlaw's output to do that was intentional copyright infringement.
This looks like a narrow holding, not one that generally covers feeding content into AI training systems.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/google-france-news-publishers-cop...
zozbot234
The case involves headnotes, not just key numbers. Your links provide examples of such headnotes, which make it very clear that a lot of human creativity and judgment is involved in authoring them - they're not a matter of purely factual information, such as a phonebook. Thus, the headnotes are copywritten, and translating them to a different language doesn't negate that copyright. This looks like a slam dunk case, but it has very little to do with AI training as such - the AI was only used to create a kind of rough indexing over the translated text.
If this was only about key numbers, it might have gone the other way because the fact-like element there is considerably greater.
chefandy
Case law is public domain. You can publish digitized copies of Westlaw books with the headnotes, keys, and a couple of other property bits redacted. Any of their proprietary elements though, definitely including the key cites, are clearly a no-go. The headnotes not only require creativity and expertise to make, many lawyers consider them indispensable (though many other lawyers apparently throw shade at lawyers that rely on them.) And since most of the rest of the book is public domain, it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest selling point for their texts. They famously vigorously defend their copyrights— the defendant surely knew what they were signing up for when they started doing this.
BoorishBears
> which make it very clear that a lot of human creativity and judgment is involved in authoring them
What's funny is that any SOTA LLM today could definitely author them, and even LexisNexis advertises the fact: https://www.lexisnexis.com/community/insights/legal/b/produc...
preinheimer
Great. The stated goal of a lot of these companies seems to be “train the model on the output of humans, then hire us instead of the humans”.
It’s been interesting that media where watermarking has been feasible (like photography) have seen creators get access to some compensation, while text based creators get nothing.
rolph
rotate similar [but different] fonts [or character pages] over each character. the sequence represents data thus watermark.
WillAdams
but the font changes won't be expressed in the (plain text) output of the LLM.
yifanl
Presumably the font will represent letters to look like a different letter, making it not useful to LLMs scraping the site but useful for visual readers.
This would have detrimental effects to people who use screen readers or have their own stylesheets of course.
rolph
yes thats right a plain text will be distinctive from a watermark version thus outed as an automated forgery. vs incorrect watermark sugesting human attempt to forge, this introduces complications for the generation of output, namely conserving the cypher as well as making sense
simonw
Interesting to note from this 2020 story (when ROSS shut down) that the company was founded in 2014 and went out of business in 2020: https://www.lawnext.com/2020/12/legal-research-company-ross-...
The fact that it took until 2024 for the case to resolve shows how long the wheels of justice can take to turn!
qingcharles
Litigation takes forever. Especially when you factor COVID in. I'm still litigating cases from over a decade ago that are probably several years from resolution, just in the district court. Then you can spin through appeals courts for another five years. And that's civil.
Criminal, especially a death row case, can take 20+ years to exhaust every level of appellate review. In Illinois there are at least nine levels of review available to you without going through second rounds of review, state habeas, and collateral attacks like applications for clemency, pardons etc. If you're not paying for lawyers, expect each level to take around two years or more.
freeAgent
My father practiced corporate tax law and regularly had cases at trial that resolved issues from 20-30 years prior.
simonw
That's wild, I had no idea. I have trouble imagining a case where it's worth spending 30 years coming to a conclusion, but I guess that's one many reasons I'm not a corporate tax lawyer!
freeAgent
One such repeating case ended up settling for over $10B, so it was definitely worth it!
To clarify, they spent decades litigating the same fundamental issue for each year’s tax filings, with each filing year taking multiple years to get to court. The plaintiffs won every single case until the government finally settled all the remaining tax years for that amount. Each year prior was worth hundreds of millions.
jll29
Note this case is explicitly NOT about large language model type AI - Ross' product is just a traditional search engine (information retrieval system), not a neural transformer a la ChatGPT.
About judge Bibas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephanos_Bibas
dkjaudyeqooe
The fair use aspect of the ruling should send a chill down the spines of all generative AI vendors. It's just one ruling but it's still bad.
palmotea
> The fair use aspect of the ruling should send a chill down the spines of all generative AI vendors. It's just one ruling but it's still bad.
So, in other words, it's good.
aurizon
At the heart of this is a very greedy racket:- court reporters who 'own' the copyright to every word spoken by anyone in court that they transcribe to a transcript that they do not own the source to (judges/witnesses/lawyers/defendants in truth own it) They then milk huge fees for these transcripts and limit use/access/derivative works with huge fees. An AI verbatim transcriber would up end them, so that will be prevented, as will anything that shakes the tree.
habinero
No, their work is valuable and they deserve to make money off of it.
The reason why it's valuable is it's transcribed live (usually with video) and is accurate and verifiable. Words and names are spelled correctly and speakers are correctly identified. Court reporters will stop speakers and ask for spelling or to repeat words.
AI transcriptions can't do that.
aurizon
It is valuable, but it should not be extortionable
jug
I spontaneously feel like this is bad news for open AI, while playing in the hands of corporate behemoths able to strike expensive deals with major publishers and top it off with the public domain.
I’m not sure this signals the end of AI and a victory for the human, but rather who gets to train the models?
varsketiz
Great decision for humans.
Is this type of risk the reason why OpenAI masquerades as a non-profit?
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oidar
Ross intelligence was creating a product that would directly compete against Thomson Reuters. Pretty clearly not fair use.
https://archive.is/mu49I