Re Create Members Allies File Thomson Reuters V Ross Amicus Brief In

Leo Migdal

-Dec 9, 2025, 4:44 AM

re create members allies file thomson reuters v ross amicus brief in

Two attorneys, one using Westlaw and Headnotes, the other prompting an AI legal tool. Images are meant to be broadly illustrative and are not intended to be accurate in every detail. Yesterday Authors Alliance filed an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence, the long-running lawsuit between Thomson Reuters, owner of Westlaw (a legal research platform) and ROSS Intelligence, an AI-powered start up legal research platform. The suit is about ROSS’s use of Thomson Reuters’ Headnotes (concise summaries of legal points within cases) to create training data for its own AI-driven legal research platform. While no headnotes were reproduced in the ROSS system outputs, Thomson Reuters sued based on ROSS’s access and use of the headnotes in the intermediate step of training its system.

Though the suit is different in many ways from other generative AI lawsuits winding their way through the courts, this one is significant because it is the first time a US Circuit Court will... We published a post back in February explaining the lower court’s decision, of which we are quite critical on several key points. ROSS filed its opening brief a week ago, raising two principal arguments: The long-running copyright litigation between Thomson Reuters and ROSS Intelligence is now pending in the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for an interlocutory appeal of the trial judge’s rulings in favor of TR. Recently here, I reported on the 10 amicus curiae briefs filed in support of ROSS, all arguing that the now-defunct AI legal research startup did not violate copyright law.

Now, nine amicus briefs have been filed in support of TR. Those filing briefs range from major movie studios such as Disney and Paramount, to news media and copyright organizations, to individual copyright law professors, and even to TR’s principal competitor LexisNexis. (Note: All of my stories covering this case back to 2020 can be found here.) The primary argument of all nine briefs is that Westlaw’s headnotes are sufficiently original to qualify for copyright and that ROSS’s unauthorized copying of them to build its AI legal research platform was not... On November 25, 2025, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) filed an amicus brief in the important AI case Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, an infringement suit first brought by Thomson Reuters and West Publishing in May 2020 in response to ROSS’s unauthorized use of copyrighted material to train its AI system, including material that copied and...

The case is now before the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit following the February 2025 opinion of the U.S. District Court for Delaware finding ROSS squarely liable for infringement. AAP’s brief urges the appeals court to affirm the district court’s decision by similarly rejecting ROSS’s fair use arguments as fundamentally inconsistent with copyright precedent, including by rejecting the premise that ROSS’s unabashed copying... Moreover, the brief emphasizes, the district court properly concluded that ROSS’s AI product directly competed with the Westlaw legal research database and would harm the AI training market. “Delaware was the first in the nation to recognize that usurping copyrighted materials for AI training is infringement not innovation, and that such actions harm the ongoing development and long-term potential of licensing markets,”... Pallante, President and CEO of the Association of American Publishers.

“There is no sweeping exception to copyright law that gives AI companies a free pass to usurp the expression of authors and publishers for commercial gain. We hope the Third Circuit will reinforce the rights of copyright owners to authorize, not suffer, the use of their intellectual property in AI products and tools, and to participate financially in the derivative... Like the many technologies before AI that have leveraged and depended upon valuable works of authorship for profit and success, AI is a market to which copyright owners are fundamentally entitled.” The chart below lists key licensing agreements for textual works that have been publicly reported. AAP’s full amicus brief can be found here. Last week, Tim Hwang, with help from Sam Roland and Joshua Levine, filed an amicus brief regarding Thomson Reuters et al.

v. Ross. This case presents a narrow question with broad consequences: when a developer copies text at a nonpublic, intermediate stage to train an AI model, and the user‑facing outputs are functional content (here, judicial opinions)—not... Though the lower court attempted to differentiate this case from new generative AI models, stating explicitly “Ross’s AI is not generative AI,” the analysis the court conducts belies the attempt.2 Mem. Op. at 17–18.

Nearly all AI models, whether search, text, vision, or other, undertake the same process of intermediate training and public output. Therefore, the reasoning of this Court—particularly as the first appeals circuit to rule on this issue—will establish an important precedent on all AI fair use. Below, we have provided our view on the most faithful reading of the applicable law in this novel context. The rule emerging from statute and precedent is clear: factor one favors fair use when (1) the use of the copy at issue is an intermediate step to achieve an end distinct from the... The rule has clear limits that protect the interests of the rightsholder. These limits preserve incentives for expressive works while supporting the continued progress in AI methods that is key to our nation's economic vitality.

It does not excuse training or deployment that stores or outputs the plaintiff’s prose (or derivative summaries) to end users; it does not excuse copying beyond what is reasonably necessary where less expressive alternatives... Those uses would defeat the presumption and create expressive substitution cognizable under 17 U.S.C. § 107(4). The statute draws two lines. Section 107 separates purpose/character from market effect; 17 U.S.C. §§ 102(b), 103(b) limit protection to original expression, not ideas, facts, methods of operation, systems, or law/taxonomy.

Any rule must keep factors one and four distinct. Precedent then supplies the standard. Warhol centers the “use at issue” and presumes factor one weighs against fair use when purposes are the same and the use is commercial—unless there is “other justification.” Andy Warhol Found. for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S.

508, 532–33 (2023). That justification is the settled doctrine permitting nonpublic, proportional intermediate copying to reach functional elements. The justification is derived from a line of cases dealing with functional learning rather than public communication, thereby supplying Warhol’s “other justification.” Factor four then asks only about markets for protected expression and traditional... Because outputs are opinions only, the relevant market is licensing of or replacement headnote text, and a bare nonpublic “license to be trained on” is not a market for expression; no cognizable harm appears... This Court should adopt the rule above and evaluate the record accordingly: treat nonpublic, reasonably necessary functional training as satisfying factor one and confine factor-four markets to expression and traditional derivatives. On November 26, the News/Media Alliance filed an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v.

Ross Intelligence, Inc., a case concerning Ross Intelligence’s unauthorized use of Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw headnotes to build an AI-powered legal search engine to compete directly with Westlaw. The brief, in support of Thomson Reuters, highlighted news publishers’ reliance on copyright to protect their investment in quality journalism, and noted that uses like Ross’ undermine their ability to create and disseminate original... The brief argued that the district court had correctly found Ross’ use of over 2,000 headnotes infringing, and urged the circuit court to uphold the basic fair use tenet that one may not engage... Noting that Ross’ use was commercial and not transformative, and that the fair use precedents relied on by Ross were readily distinguishable, the brief also argued that “enabling AI companies to divert users away... Read the full brief here. Public Knowledge joined a coalition led by Electronic Frontier Foundation in filing an amicus brief in support of Thomas Reuters v.

Ross Intelligence, Inc. in support of the defendant-appellant.Thomson Reuters alleged that Ross infringed its copyrights by using editorial headnotes from its legal research service Westlaw to develop an AI-based legal search tool. The United States District Court for the District of Delaware agreed, holding that the headnotes were copyrightable and that Ross’s use was not protected by fair use. The comments argue that judicial opinions and their distilled holdings are uncopyrightable under the “government edicts” doctrine and, at most, Westlaw’s headnotes enjoy only “thin” protection because they simply restate factual holdings. In first major decision regarding copyright liability for AI developers, district court holds on summary judgment that creator of AI-powered legal research tool infringed copyrights in thousands of Westlaw headnotes used in training data,... In December 2020, Thomson Reuters, owner of the ubiquitous legal research platform Westlaw, sued AI startup Ross Intelligence, claiming that Ross had unlawfully used Westlaw’s proprietary headnotes—summaries of key points of law derived from...

According to Thomson Reuters, Ross had initially asked to license its Westlaw content to train its AI search tool, but Thomson Reuters declined. Instead, Ross engaged a third-party company, LegalEase, to create so-called bulk memos that largely incorporated Westlaw’s headnotes and that were in turn used to train Ross’ search tool. Ross’ tool did not employ generative AI. Rather, the tool was created to field legal questions and output elements of already-published court opinions, which, as government works, are not protected by copyright. Ross, in response, raised various defenses to Thomson Reuters’ copyright infringement claim, including, principally, fair use. Thomson Reuters subsequently moved for partial summary judgment on direct copyright infringement and several related defenses, and Ross moved for summary judgment on Thomson Reuters’ copyright claims.

Both sides also moved for summary judgment on fair use. In September 2023, the court initially denied the parties’ cross-motions for summary judgment in substantial part, holding that there were factual issues as to whether the headnotes were sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection,... (Read our summary of the court’s earlier decision here.) However, in the run-up to the trial, which had initially been scheduled for August 2024, the court continued the trial date and requested that the... In reconsidering its earlier summary judgment decision sua sponte, the court reversed course in several important respects. First, the court granted Thomson Reuters’ motion for partial summary judgment on its direct copyright infringement claim in substantial part, holding that Ross had infringed over 2,000 Westlaw headnotes. In doing so, the court held that those headnotes were sufficiently original to warrant copyright protection.

Although a headnote is derived from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court noted that it “can introduce creativity by distilling, synthesizing, or explaining part of an opinion.” The selection and arrangement of facts in a... As to Westlaw’s Key Number System, the court held that even if that system was largely operated by a computer program, Thomson Reuters’ organization of legal topics by key number was nonetheless sufficiently original... The court then considered whether the LegalEase bulk memos actually copied and were substantially similar to the Westlaw headnotes. Having considered 2,830 headnotes that were properly before the court on summary judgment, the court held that 2,243 were actually copied and substantially similar to the bulk memos. However, it left for trial the question as to whether the balance of those headnotes and the Key Number System were infringed, given unresolved factual questions regarding whether they had actually been copied. Further departing from its earlier decision, the court held that Ross’ use of the headnotes did not constitute fair use as a matter of law.

The first fair use factor—the purpose and character of the use—weighed in favor of Thompson Reuters, the court held. Following the U.S. Supreme Court’s guidance in Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, the court determined that Ross’ use of the headnotes was “commercial” in nature and did not have a “further purpose or different character” from Thomson Reuters’ because Ross had used the headnotes to... This month, a federal judge rejected an AI startup's claim that using copyrighted material to train its AI system was permissible under the fair use doctrine.

The decision—Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc., No. 1:20-CV-613-SB (D. Del. Feb. 11, 2025)—marks the first time a court has rejected a fair use defense in this context.

Re Create Members Allies File Thomson Reuters V Ross Amicus Brief In

People Also Search

Two Attorneys, One Using Westlaw And Headnotes, The Other Prompting

Though The Suit Is Different In Many Ways From Other

Now, Nine Amicus Briefs Have Been Filed In Support Of

The Case Is Now Before The United States Court Of

“There Is No Sweeping Exception To Copyright Law That Gives