ROSS Intelligence filed its opening brief in the first appeal of a fair use decision (fair use denied) in the Third Circuit Court of Appeals.
The copyright lawsuit was filed by Thomson Reuters, parent of the company for legal research West. They alleged that ROSS infringed their copyrights in their headnotes summarizing judicial opinions (which are not copyrightable themselves).
As the first appeal of a decision on fair use in AI training, this case has enormous significance.
Two issues raised by ROSS’s appeal:
(1) Is a short quote or paraphrase of a judicial holding copyrightable?
(2) Does the fair use doctrine protect ROSS’s internal use of Westlaw’s headnotes in memos that served as training data for an AI legal search engine that produced only non-infringing outputs?
Excerpts of the Introduction and Summary of Argument
Ross intelligence, at p. 40 (BRACKETED NUMBERS INSERTED)
Using copyrighted works to train an AI legal search engine is transformative. Building a “search engine” that [i] “makes possible new forms of research,” Google Books, 804 F.3d at 209, or [ii] “a distinct and different computing environment,” Google, 593 U.S. at 31, is transformative because it “fulfill[s] the objective of copyright law to stimulate creativity for public illumination.” Hon. Pierre Leval, Toward a Fair Use Standard, 103 HARV. L. REV. 1105, 1111 (1990). ROSS did both.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
DOWNLOAD ROSS INTELLIGENCE OPENING BRIEF (REDACTED)
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