• by Wendy Davis , Yesterday

Ross Intelligence indicated in a court filing last week that it will seek a new appellate hearing in a closely watched dispute over whether it infringed copyright by training its legal research service on material owned by Thomson Reuters' Westlaw.

Last month, a three-judge panel of the Third Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a trial judge's ruling against Ross.

"The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and Ross aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose," Circuit Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves wrote in an opinion joined by Judges Emil Bove and L. Felipe Restrepo.

"We therefore hold that Thomson Reuters’s materials are copyrightable and that Ross’s use was not fair," they added in a written opinion, which was made publicly available late last month.

Last week, Ross asked the court to extend the deadline for seeking a new hearing in front of the entire Third Circuit. Ross is seeking an extension from October 13 to November 3.

The company noted that the panel's ruling was the first appellate opinion "to address whether using copyrighted works to train an AI model is fair use."

Ross aded that the dispute "raises multiple complex issues of copyright law."

The battle between Ross and Westlaw began in 2020, when Thomson Reuters sued Ross for allegedly training its legal research platform on Westlaw "headnotes" -- summaries of key points in judicial opinions.

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 sought a dismissal on multiple grounds, including that it was protected by fair use principles.

In February 2025, Judge Stephanos Bibas sided against Ross, ruling that the company wasn't entitled to a fair-use defense because it used Westlaw's headnotes for the same purpose as Thomson Reuters, and aimed to compete with it.

Ross then appealed that ruling to the Third Circuit, and tech organizations as well as digital rights groups backed the artificial intelligence company.

NetChoice and other 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 sided with Westlaw in friend-of-the-court briefs. Hollywood studios including Disney argued that a ruling in favor of Ross would "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."