Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
www.wired.com
Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US
24 comments
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“None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water. I reject them all,” wrote US District Court of Delaware judge Stephanos Bibas, in a summary judgement.
The AI company lost. Good news for a change.
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Paywall
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Thanks works fine, I can see you also included it as part of the post. 👍
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tragic. no one should need to pay to read the law
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That's literally not what the ruling is about. It was about an AI bro company using proprietary, copyrighted materials to train its AI, which they obtained by questionable means, after being denied license to do so by the IP owners. Further, after training the AI with unlicensed materials, they launched a competing product.
Whether you support IP or not, the AI company is clearly in the wrong here.
It's a pretty definitive example of many AI companies being little more than leeches, stealing others' work and repackaging it as their own. All with zero long-term consideration of "what do we do when there's noone left to leech off of because we undermined the ability of those make the source data to make a living, while unnecessarily driving increased emissions and consumption of potable water for something that provides little actual value do humanity as a whole?"
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Whether you support IP or not, the AI company is clearly in the wrong here.
they're both wrong to restrict access. if legal analysis is necessary to understand the law, then restricting access to that analysis, or it's free dissemination, is also wrong.
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stealing others' work
Reuters still has their analysis. nothing was stolen.
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Ah, fuck, is that what the case is about? That sucks; that's the kind of case where they both need to lose:
- The law shouldn't be copyrightable
- AI companies shouldn't be allowed to 'launder' copyright (and more to the point, copyleft) by reproducing chunks of copyrighted works divorced from their license
If I were more conspiracy-minded, I would almost think that somebody intentionally decided to resolve this case first in order to guarantee that they set a disastrous precedent.
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It's not what this case is about. Reuters runs a service called Westlaw that provides access to a bunch of legal materials, including summaries and explanations of cases that are written by its lawyers. Ross Intelligence wanted access to those summaries, so that it could train AI to make a competing product. As you can imagine, Reuters said no to this.
So, Ross bought summaries from someone else, another company that did have access to Westlaw, and used those to train its AI. Today, the court found (among other things), that a few thousand of the summaries that Ross's AI produced are way too similar to Westlaw's summaries for it to be a coincidence. Ross had argued (among other things) that its summaries were only similar because they were describing the law, and Reuters doesn't/can't have a copyright on the law. The court rejected this argument, saying, essentially "Yeah, it's true that Reuters doesn't have a copyright on the law, but it does have a copyright on the summaries that its lawyers write. It takes skill and judgment to decide which parts of a law or decision are important for people doing legal research, and to present them in a way that's easy for people to understand. You clearly copied many of them."
This isn't an exhaustive discussion of all the issues covered in the opinion, because I'm a sleepy lawyer, but it's the most important part.
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I don't think that's the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn't for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.
If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren't making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don't deserve any sympathy for altruism.A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?
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So if stealing copyrighted information to train an AI isn't fair use, then isn't pretty much every commercial LLM illegal?
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