Thomson Reuters scores early win in AI copyright battles in the US

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LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thomson Reuters has won an early battle in court over the question of fair use in artificial intelligence-related copyright cases.

The media and technology company filed a lawsuit against Ross Intelligence — a now-defunct legal research firm — in 2020, arguing they had used materials from Thomson Reuters' own legal platform Westlaw to train an AI model without permission.

Judge Stephanos Bibas of the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a decision Tuesday that affirmed Ross Intelligence was not permitted under U.S. copyright law to use the company’s content in order to build a competing platform.

Thomson Reuters and Ross Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

In his summary judgment, Bibas said that “none of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” and ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters on the issue of “fair use.” The “fair use” doctrine of U.S. laws allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.

Thomson Reuters' win comes as a growing number of lawsuits have been filed by authors, visual artists and music labels against developers of AI models over similar issues.

What links each of these cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works.

OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft have also battled copyright infringement cases led by writers such as John Grisham, Jodi Picoult and “Game of Thrones” novelist George R. R. Martin; and another set of lawsuits from media outlets such as The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Mother Jones.