Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH and West Publishing Corp. v. Ross Intelligence, Inc.

Ross sought to license a database of legal materials from Thomson Reuters’ Westlaw database, in order to to build a legal search AI. Westlaw does not merely store the public domain case law, but also writes its own Westlaw headnotes, which summarize and analysis points of law.

Thomson Reuters refused to license data to a competition. Rose contracted with a third party, LegalEase, to get training data using “Bulk Memos”.

The court found that Westlaw headnotes are sufficiently creative to each have a valid copyright as an individual work. The court granted summary judgment on the copying of 2243 headnotes, where “actual copying is so obvious that no reasonable jury could find otherwise.” In each of these instances, the court found that the Bulk Memos merely reproduced Westlaw headnotes with minimal changes.

The court rejects all of Ross’s defenses to infringement, including innocent infringement, copyright misuse, the merger defense, and the scenes á faire defense.

In the fair use analysis, the court finds that Ross’s use is commercial and not transformative. Ross uses the copies for the same purpose as Westlaw, to index and search relevant case law. Factor two goes to Ross, because the headnotes have sufficient creative for copyright, but the material is not that creative. The amount and substantiality of the work used also favors Ross, since Ross’s output to an end user does not include West headnotes.

The fourth factor leans in favor of Thomson Reuters. Even with the best interpretation of facts, all Ross is doing is creating a direct competitor to Westlaw. “There is nothing that Thomson Reuters created that Ross could not have created for itself or hired LegalEase to create for it without infringing Thomson Reuters’s copyrights.”

The court grants partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters on 2,243 of the Headnotes at issue in the case.