Fair Use

ROSS Intelligence is appealing a Delaware federal court ruling that found it infringed Thomson Reuters' copyrights in Westlaw headnotes and related legal research materials. On February 11, 2025, Judge Stephanos Bibas granted summary judgment to Thomson Reuters, holding that ROSS had copied 2,243 headnotes without permission and that its fair use defense failed. The court determined that ROSS's AI-driven legal search product functioned as a market substitute for Westlaw rather than a transformative use. The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit under docket 1:20-cv-00613, which Thomson Reuters initiated in 2020.