• by Wendy Davis , 2 hours ago

The music and movie industries as well as book publishers are urging an appeals court to rule that artificial intelligence company Ross Intelligence infringed copyright by training its legal research service on material published by Thomson Reuters' Westlaw.

"The unlicensed, unchecked use of copyrighted works for AI training is not fair use," the American Association of Publishers argues in a friend-of-the-court brief filed this week with the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Recording Industry Association of America and a coalition of Hollywood studios -- including Disney and Paramount -- make similar arguments in separate friend-of-the-court briefs.

They are weighing in on a dispute dating to 2020, when Thomson Reuters sued Ross for allegedly training its legal research platform on Westlaw "headnotes" -- summaries of key points in judicial opinions.

The battle could result in the first major appellate ruling addressing whether artificial intelligence companies are entitled to train their platforms on other publishers' material.

Thomson Reuters alleged that Ross “surreptitiously” obtained Westlaw's headnotes from a licensee, then drew on them to “rush out a competing product without having to spend the resources, creative energy, and time to create it itself.”

Ross argued the matter should be dismissed for several reasons. Among others, the company said it made fair use of the material.

In February, Judge Stephanos Bibas ruled that Ross wasn't protected by fair use principles because it used Westlaw's headnotes for the same purpose as Thomson Reuters, and aimed to compete with it.

Ross is appealing that ruling to the 3rd Circuit, and tech organizations as well as digital rights groups are backing the artificial intelligence company.

NetChoice and other tech groups argued in a friend-of-the-court brief that Ross's use of the headnotes was transformative because the headnotes enabled Ross to create a new natural language legal search engine.

Entertainment and publishing organizations disagree.

"The fair-use inquiry here is straightforward. As a shortcut in the process of creating a legal research product that would compete directly with plaintiffs’ Westlaw tool, defendant copied Westlaw headnotes and put them to a use indistinguishable from plaintiffs’ use," Disney and other studios say in their friend-of-the-court brief, filed Wednesday.

Ross's conduct "was not fair use, and holding otherwise would undermine fundamental copyright principles," the studios write.

They add that a ruling in Ross's favor "would also chill incentives to continue investing in and creating the movies and television shows that delight audiences worldwide and fuel the engine of the American entertainment industry."

The Recording Industry Association of America and National Music Publishers Association argue in a separate brief that the fair use arguments advanced by Ross and its supporters "stray far from the proper application of the fair use doctrine in ways that deeply threaten the music ecosystem."

Artificial intelligence "has a unique capacity to output an endless stream of content that displaces the market for and value of the copyrighted works on which it trained," those groups write.

They also suggest that the current battle over artificial intelligence companies' use of copyrighted material could be more consequential to the music industry than prior fights over online copyright -- including lawsuits centered on online file-sharing.

"What was once the challenge of curbing infringement in the analog world, such as the unauthorized duplication of cassette tapes, grew into the global threat of online infringements of exact digital copies distributed through peer-to-peer file sharing networks and the proliferation of user-generated content on streaming platforms," the groups write. "But as daunting as past challenges have been, they are dwarfed in scope and jeopardy by AI services that produce digital files that emulate and compete with human-authored music."

The 3rd Circuit has not yet set a date for oral arguments.