• by Wendy Davis  @wendyndavis, April 4, 2025

Artificial Intelligence company Ross Intelligence can immediately ask an appeals court to review a ruling that it infringed copyright by training its legal research service on material published by the competing service Westlaw, owned by Thomson Reuters, a federal judge said Friday.

“I recognize that there are substantial grounds for difference of opinion on controlling legal issues in this case,” Judge Stephanos Bibas in Delaware wrote in an order issued Friday. “These issues have the potential to change the shape of the trial.”

The order comes in a legal battle dating to 2020, when Thomson Reuters alleged that Ross -- which sells legal research tools -- wrongly trained its platform on Westlaw “headnotes,” which are summaries of key points in legal opinions.

Ross argued that it should prevail for numerous reasons, including that it made fair use of the Westlaw.

Bibas rejected that argument, ruling in February that Ross's use of the material protected by fair use concepts because it used Westlaw's headnotes for the same purpose as Thomson Reuters, and intended to develop a product that would substitute for Westlaw's in the market.

“Ross’s use is not transformative because it does not have a 'further purpose or different character' from Thomson Reuters’s,” he wrote at the time.

The judge added that a jury would decide remaining factual questions in the case, including whether some of Thomson Reuters' copyrights had expired.

Ross sought to immediately appeal the first-of-its-kind ruling, arguing that it would “stop fair learning based on factual statements.”

“This copyright case presents urgent questions governing the innovation at the heart of America’s preeminence -- at least for now -- in artificial intelligence systems,” Ross wrote in its request for permission to ask the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals to intervene.

Thomson Reuters opposed the request, arguing that a pre-trial appeal would delay the case, which has already been pending for five years.