After nearly five years, a judicial opinion has been rendered in the lawsuit of Thomson Reuters versus Ross Intelligence, which we reported on earlier.
In 2020, Reuters sued its competitor Ross Intelligence in the United States. Reuters claimed that Ross Intelligence had copied content from the Westlaw database without consent and had used this content to train a competing AI-driven legal research platform. Reuters argued that this was copyright infringement.
Ross Intelligence stated that it was not, and relied on the American fair use doctrine. Fair use is an exception within US copyright law that allows the use of copyright-protected material in some situations without the consent of the copyright holder. Criteria considered in this context are the extent of transformation, the amount of copied material, and the impact on the market for the original work. There is no such specific exception in Dutch copyright law.
However, the Federal Court in Delaware held that the use made by Ross Intelligence was not included in fair use. Copying the Westlaw database was not considered to be transformative and, moreover, was seen as detrimental to the market position of the original works. Therefore, the Court concluded that Ross Intelligence had infringed Reuters’ copyrights.
The nature of this case is special, since it concerns case law and pre-dates the current AI boom. It will be interesting to learn whether this opinion will be copied in other lawsuits.
