Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. ROSS Intelligence Inc.

What the court wrote

Verbatim from the court's document (public domain). Ellipses mark omitted text; nothing is paraphrased.

Ross’s use is not transformative because it does not have a “further purpose or different character” from Thomson Reuters’s. Id. at 529. Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw. It is undisputed that Ross’s AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new content itself). Rather, when a user enters a legal question, Ross spits back relevant judicial opinions that have already been written. D.I. 723 at 5. That process resembles how Westlaw uses headnotes and key numbers to return a list of cases with fitting headnotes. Thomson Reuters uses its headnotes and Key Number System primarily to help legal researchers navigate Westlaw and (possibly, as the parties dispute this) to improve Westlaw’s internal search tool. D.I. 769 at 14 (10:24:52). The parties agree that Ross and Westlaw are competitors. D.I. 752-1 at 4. So at first glance, this factor looks simple. But, as Ross argues, the headnotes do not appear as part of the final product that Ross put forward to consumers. The copying occurred at an intermediate step: Ross 17 turned the headnotes into numerical data about the relationships among legal words to feed into its AI. D.I. 727 at 22. That makes this factor much trickier.

Authorities cited in the passage: Andy Warhol Found. for Visual Arts, Inc. v. Goldsmith, 598 U.S. 508 (2023)