this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2025
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tragic. no one should need to pay to read the law
Ah, fuck, is that what the case is about? That sucks; that's the kind of case where they both need to lose:
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.
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.
I don't trust that judge's ability to determine whether they were copied if it wasn't verbatim. which is what copyright is. to control an idea, you need a patent.