Legal research platform ROSS Intelligence trained its AI system on headnotes from Westlaw, the Thomson Reuters legal database. The Third Circuit ruled that this was a copyright violation, holding that the headnotes are copyrightable and that their use in training was not fair use.
The decision is significant because it applies copyright law to AI training data, an area of increasing litigation. The court rejected ROSS's fair use defense, though the source does not elaborate on the full reasoning behind that conclusion.
The case is one of several in the source's weekly roundup of federal appeals court rulings. It may offer a reference point for other disputes over whether AI systems can be trained on copyrighted works without permission.