Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Provides Insight into How Courts May Evaluate Fair Use Defense for AI Training Data

The court found that ROSS had infringed certain of Thomson Reuters’s copyrighted material and that ROSS could not benefit from a fair use defense. In doing so, the court noted that “[i]t is undisputed that ROSS’s AI is not generative AI (AI that writes content itself)” and that this case only has to do with non-generative AI. The court found that Thomson Reuters has a valid copyright to the material, ROSS copied protected elements of Westlaw’s headnotes, and some headnotes and memos were substantially similar.