Robert Ambrogi Blog
For the second time in the long and winding road of the copyright lawsuit brought by Thomson Reuters against the now-shuttered legal research startup ROSS Intelligence, the trial has been postponed on the eve of its start date.
Although a pretrial conference had been set for yesterday and the trial scheduled for the week of May 12, 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, issued an order April 4 postponing the trial in order to allow ROSS to file an interlocutory appeal.
ROSS sought leave to file an interlocutory appeal after Judge Bibas issued an opinion Feb. 11 granting partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters, finding that ROSS infringed TR’s copyrights in Westlaw headnotes when it used them to train its AI-powered legal research platform.
Even with that Feb. 11 ruling, several issues remained to be decided at trial, including whether some of Thomson Reuters’s copyrights have expired or were untimely created, and whether ROSS in fact copied Westlaw’s Key Number System, as Thomson Reuters alleges.
See all stories about this lawsuit.
In his brief April 4 order entered on the docket of the case, Judge Bibas said that he was certifying two questions to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals:
- Whether the West headnotes and West Key Number System are original.
- Whether Ross’s use of the headnotes was fair use.
He said that he planned to follow the order with a written opinion explaining his reasoning. As of today, the docket does not reflect that he has done that.
ROSS had brought in law firm White & Case to handle this interlocutory appeal. Anna Naydonov, partner at White & Case, issued this statement: “This is an important first step in obtaining immediate appellate guidance on fair use in AI. This case is closely followed and has warranted interlocutory review for good reason: it will help shape the law critical to advancement in AI technology. We look forward to defending U.S. innovation in AI before the Third Circuit.”
The case had previously been scheduled to go to trial last August, but was mysteriously continued on the eve of starting. When he issued his summary judgment ruling on Feb. 11, Judge Bibas explained that earlier continuance, writing that, as he had studied the case materials in more depth in the run-up to the trial, he had decided that an earlier summary judgment ruling “had not gone far enough,” and so he continued the trial to allow the parties to renew their summary judgment briefing.
That second round of briefing resulting in the Feb. 11 opinion that the 3rd Circuit will now review.
The case has been ongoing since 2020, when Thomson Reuters sued ROSS, alleging that it had copied Westlaw content to train its competing AI legal research platform. According to the complaint, after Thomson Reuters refused to license its content to ROSS, ROSS contracted with legal research company LegalEase to obtain the content indirectly through bulk memos that were created using Westlaw headnotes.