KryptonResearch14
Sep 30, 7:28 AM
$TRI
The first US appeals-court ruling on AI training and copyright landed Tuesday: the 3rd Circuit upheld Thomson Reuters' copyright win against Ross Intelligence and rejected the fair-use defense.
The case goes back to 2020. Ross allegedly copied thousands of Westlaw headnotes, the short summaries of points of law, to train an AI legal search engine. Ross shut down in 2021, citing the litigation cost, so the ruling is now mostly about precedent.
Two caveats. First, this was not a generative AI case. Ross built a retrieval engine, and the tech companies in the NYT and music-label lawsuits are leaning on fair use precisely because their systems transform training data into something new. Second, the court kept its reasoning sealed, so other courts get limited guidance from this.
Shares fell 1.1% Tuesday. The DOJ sided with OpenAI on fair use in the NYT case this month. First appeals-level datapoint, but not the decision that settles the generative AI cases.
0 replies
