Judge Bibas issued his ruling on ROSS Intelligence’s request for a filtration hearing. (For background, visit our prior analysis.)
Although Judge Bibas didn’t grant the motion, he did allow ROSS Intelligence the opportunity to “submit a list of all headnotes it believes are verbatim quotations, or vary trivially from verbatim quotations, of judicial opinions by Monday, July 29, at noon EDT.”
“If Thomson Reuters wishes to submit comments on the list, it must do so by Monday, August 5, at noon EDT. “
Based on the oral order, Judge Bibas appears inclined to filter out any such verbatim quotations from the jury’s consideration: “This Court will not filter out any headnotes that are neither direct quotations nor trivial variations on direct quotations. The jury must consider all headnotes that it could reasonably find are original and thus eligible for copyright protection.”
This is similar to what we suggested in our prior analysis: to allow ROSS to provide an offer of proof of what headnotes or topics are uncopyrightable.
Of course, the hard part for ROSS now is to devise a computer comparison that will examine headnotes against the language in judicial opinions. Should be interesting.