Yesterday I noted that th 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had issued an opinion in the long-running copyright battle between Thomson Reuters and the now-shuttered AI legal research company ROSS Intelligence, but that the opinion was sealed and not viewable by the public.

Update: ROSS says it will appeal to Supreme Court.

Today, it was revealed that the court has ruled in favor of Thomson Reuters on the two primary issues that were before it — copyrightability of the Westlaw headnotes and fair use.

That makes it the first federal appellate decision to address fair use in the context of AI training, although the unique facts of the case, including that the copying was done before the advent of generative AI, may minimize the implications.

While the opinion remains under seal while the court allows the parties to request redactions, what we know is that the 3rd Cicuit panel entered judgment affirming Judge Stephanos Bibas’s February 2025 summary judgment in favor of Thomson Reuters.

(For full coverage and background on this case, see my archive of stories.

The two issues on which the lower court had granted summary judgment were:

Whether a short quote or paraphrase of a judicial holding can be copyrightable.

Whether fair use protected ROSS’s internal use of Westlaw headnotes as training data for an AI legal-search engine whose outputs themselves did not infringe.…

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