The judge rules that replicating human-authored content without permission does not qualify as 'fair use' of AI under copyright law.

A US judge has ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters in a AI training fight against Ross Intelligence, a legal AI startup, according to The Verge. Thomson Reuters sued Ross Intelligence in 2020 for using the company’s legal research platform Westlaw to train Ross Intelligence’s AI without permission.

After reconsidering the case, the judge issued a partial summary judgement, which asks whether a non-generative AI system’s content counts as original work.

A federal judge in Delaware on Tuesday said that a former competitor of Thomson Reuters was not permitted by U.S. copyright law to copy the information and technology company's content to build a competing artificial intelligence-based legal platform.

A judge looked at possible copyright infringement defenses for Ross Intelligence and said, ‘I reject them all.’

As Wired notes, the judgment blows a hole in the AI industry’s fair use defense. The industry has used fair use (the same parody laws that birthed “ Dumb Starbucks “) to claim that what they do, e.g.,

An AI company lifted material from Thomson Reuters' research platform, arguing fair use and innocent infringement. A court has ruled it was copyright violation.

Global media and technology giant Thomson Reuters has won the first major AI copyright case in the US. The lawsuit was filed against legal AI start-up Ross Intelligence in 2020. Thomson Reuters alleged that Ross Intelligence illegally copied materials from its legal research firm Westlaw.

Thomson Reuters has won a victory against AI start-up Ross Intelligence for its use of copyrighted data to train its own AI models.