First Legal Ruling on AI, Copyright, and Training Data Goes the Way of Creators
Thomson Reuters has won an early victory for copyright holders after Judge Sephanos Bibas, sitting in the U.S. District Court of Delaware, granted a partial summary in favor of the company in its copyright infringement lawsuit against Ross Intelligence.
Ross was an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that Thomson Reuters sued in 2020 after it attempted to build a legal search engine using data from Thomson Reuter’s legal search engine, Westlaw. Judge Bibas writes in his decision that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” against copyright infringement accusations. He dismissed Ross’s fair use defense, emphasizing how Ross’s use of copyrighted material directly impacted the original work’s market value by creating a direct competitor.
Why is This Lawsuit About Legal Advice Relevant to a Photography Website?
Well, as Copyright Lately notes, the judgment is likely to be cited in future lawsuits surrounding intellectual property (IP) and machine learning.
There are currently a number of lawsuits winding their way through the courts that could be affected by this ruling including a photographer suing Google for allegedly using her copyrighted work to train its AI image generator model Imagen; Getty Images, which is seeking up to $1.7 billion in damages from Stability AI; and a group of artists who are suing four AI image generator companies.
However, there is a caveat that lawyers on the side of AI companies will use: Judge Bibas notes in his summary that the case involves “non-generative” AI as the data involved in the Ross case is a paltry number [25,000 memos] compared to large AI companies which hoover up millions of files to build their models.
“We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and concluded that Westlaw’s editorial content, created and maintained by our attorney editors, is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent. The copying of our content was not ‘fair use,'” a Thomson Reuters spokesperson says in a statement.
Ross shut down in 2021, citing the cost of litigation which it called “spurious.” However, AI companies with deeper pockets such as OpenAI continue to fight these legal battles.
