AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit
Furthermore, because ROSS’ use of the headnotes was insufficiently transformative and aided in the startup’s market competition with Westlaw, fair use did not apply.ROSS appealed, sending the case before a Third Circuit panel in June 2026.Following months of deliberation, U.S. Circuit Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves — a Joe Biden appointee — affirmed the federal court’s ruling on behalf of the panel, breaking the issue down into its simplest legal concepts.“Under ROSS’ framing, this case appears to concern the future of AI legal technology,” Reeves wrote for the panel Wednesday. “We therefore hold that Thomson Reuters’ materials are copyrightable and that ROSS’ use was not fair.”A Thomson Reuters spokesperson championed the ruling in a statement following the opinion’s publication.“We are pleased that the appellate court affirmed the trial court’s decision in our favor,” the spokesperson said.
- ▪Furthermore, because ROSS’ use of the headnotes was insufficiently transformative and aided in the startup’s market competition with Westlaw, fair use did not apply.ROSS appealed, sending the case before a Third Circuit panel in June 2026.F
- ▪Circuit Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves — a Joe Biden appointee — affirmed the federal court’s ruling on behalf of the panel, breaking the issue down into its simplest legal concepts.“Under ROSS’ framing, this case appears to concern the fut
- ▪“We therefore hold that Thomson Reuters’ materials are copyrightable and that ROSS’ use was not fair.”A Thomson Reuters spokesperson championed the ruling in a statement following the opinion’s publication.“We are pleased that the appellate
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Courthouse News Service |
| Canonical URL | https://www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-of-copyrighted-material-not-fair-use-third-circuit/ |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 06:18:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T06:30:43.934Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T06:30:43.934Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | HDzNhqR00zbS · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
PHILADELPHIA (CN) — The Third Circuit rejected an artificial intelligence company’s fair use defense after it trained its AI on a competitor’s product, finding the training constituted copyright infringement — and potentially setting a landmark precedent for artificial intelligence.Thomson Reuters sued now-defunct AI startup ROSS Intelligence in 2020, claiming ROSS took headnotes — short descriptions of important legal issues that appear before judicial opinions — from its Westlaw database, using a third party called LegalEase Solutions to gain access after Westlaw refused ROSS access.ROSS then used that data “not for the purposes of legal research, but to rush out a competing product” by training its artificial intelligence on Westlaw’s headnotes, Reuters said in its complaint.In 2025, a…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Courthouse News Service.
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