In recent Law360 and TechCrunch articles, partner Mark Lezama offered insight into the potential impact of a recent district court ruling on future litigation related to copyright, fair use, and artificial intelligence.
The case, Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH et al. v. ROSS Intelligence Inc., involves allegations that ROSS Intelligence infringed Thomson Reuters’s copyright in headnotes on judicial opinions.
One of several nuanced questions addressed in the court’s ruling is whether ROSS Intelligence’s copying was fair use because any copying occurred only to train ROSS’s AI system and therefore constituted “intermediate copying.” The defendant argued that the 2021 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Google v. Oracle and Ninth Circuit decisions protected intermediate copying, but the court rejected this argument.
Speaking to this topic with Law360, Lezama pointed out that the court distinguished the Google and Ninth Circuit decisions because they involved copying computer code necessary to making a product function, whereas ROSS neither copied computer code nor copied only what was necessary to reach the ideas underlying Thomson Reuters’s headnotes. On whether this could affect other copyright infringement suits brought against AI companies training generative AI tools, Lezama said, “I could see copyright owners in these generative AI cases making the same arguments, that those copying cases don’t apply here.”
Furthermore, Lezama explained to TechCrunch, “The court rejected a fair-use defense as a matter of law in part because Ross used [Thomson Reuters] headnotes to develop a competing legal research system.” He added, “Although the court hinted this might be different from a situation involving generative AI, it’s easy to see a news site arguing that copying its articles for training a generative AI is no different because the generative AI uses the copyrighted articles to compete with the news site for user attention.”
Read the Law360 article here and the TechCrunch article here.
