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Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

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Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#101

Post by greggyb »

anon373839 wrote: post #69
JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

This is an interesting opinion, but there are aspects of it that I doubt will stand the test of time. One aspect is the court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim, because the editorial decision to quote the material itself shows a “creative spark”. It really isn’t workable — in law specifically - for copyright to attach to the mere selection of a quote…

Collections of essays or poems are considered copyrightable. This seems analogous enough to me.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#102

Post by cycomanic »

saulpw wrote: post #14
veggieroll wrote: post #9

> Thomson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors, but Bibas described the fourth as the most important, and ruled that Ross “meant to compete with Westlaw by developing a market substitute.” Yep. That's what people have been saying all along. If the intent is to substitute the original, then copying is not fair use. But the problem is that the current method for training requires this volume of data. So the mod…

> So the models are legitimately not viable without massive copyright infringement. Copyright is not about acquisition, it is about publication and/or distribution. If I get a copy of Harry Potter from a dumpster, I can read it. If a company gets a copy of *all books from a torrent, they can use it to train their AI. The torrent providers may be in violation of copyright, and if the AI can be used to reproduce substa…

That's an interesting take, but false in a lot of juristictions. Even if we ignore question of if the model can distribute work, in many places even downloading content is illegal. Otherwise the person torrenting a movie would be totally in the clear, or thing about what MS would say if a company "just" downloads copies of Windows to use on their computers without ever distributing them.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#103

Post by reissbaker »

JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

I'll quote a longer portion of the transcript about generative AI, because I think it makes the opposite of your point:

Ross’s use is not transformative. Transformativeness is about the purpose of the use. “If an original work and a secondary use share the same or highly similar purposes, and the second use is of a commercial nature, the first factor is likely to weigh against fair use, absent some other justification for copying.” Warhol, 598 U.S. at 532–33. It weighs against fair use here. Ross’s use is not transformative because it does not have a “further purpose or different character” from Thomson Reuters’s. Id. at 529.

Ross was using Thomson Reuters’s headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw. It is undisputed that Ross’s AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new content itself). Rather, when a user enters a legal question, Ross spits back relevant judicial opinions that have already been written. D.I. 723 at 5. That process resembles how Westlaw uses headnotes and key numbers to return a list of cases with fitting headnotes.

I think it's quite relevant that this was not generative AI: the reason that mattered is that "transformative" use biases towards Fair Use exemptions from copyright. However, this wasn't creating new content or giving people a new way to understand the data: it was just used in a search engine, much like Westlaw provided a legal search engine. The judge is pointing out that the exact implementation details of a search engine don't grant Fair Use.

This doesn't make a ruling about generative AI, but I think it's a pretty meaningful distinction: writing new content seems much more "transformative" (in a literal sense: the old content is being used to create new content) than simply writing a similar search engine, albeit one with a better search algorithm.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#104

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mountainb wrote: post #93
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision. The "competing product" thing is probably the most extreme part of this opinion. The most important fair use factor is if the use competes with the original work, but this is generally implied to be directly competes, i.e. if you translate someone else's book from English to French and want to sell the tra…

No that is not an extreme interpretation of the fair use factors. This is a routinely emphasized factor in fair use analyses for both copyright and trademark. School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Also, § 108 provides extensive protections for libraries and archives that go beyond fair use doctrines. The idea that the schools are encouraging the stu…

> School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly

It's written into the statute as an example of something that would be fair use.

> The idea that the schools are encouraging the students to compete with the original authors of works taught in the classroom is fanciful by the meaning that courts usually apply to competition.

People go to art school primarily because they want to create art. People study computer science primarily because they want to write code. It's their direct intention and purpose to compete with existing works.

> Your example is different from this case in which Ross wanted to compete in the same market against West offering a similar service at a lower price.

So if you use Windows and then want to create Linux...

> Another reason that the schools get a carveout is because it would make most education impractical without each school obtaining special licenses for public performance for every work referenced in the classroom.

How is that logic any different than for AI training?

> But maybe that also provokes the question as to if schools really deserve that kind of sweetheart treatment (a massive indirect subsidy), or does it over-privileges formal schools relative to the commons at large?

It not only doesn't have any explicit requirement for a formal school (it just says "teaching"), it also isn't limited to teaching, teaching is just one of the things specified in the statute as being the kind of thing Congress intended fair use to include.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#105

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

aoanevdus wrote: post #82
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> simply training a model on illegally distributed text should not be copyright infringement You can train a model on copyrighted text, you just can't distribute the output in any way without violating copyright. (edit: depending on the other fair use factors). One of the big problems is that training is a mechanical process, so there is a direct line between the copyrighted works and the model's output, regardless o…

What’s a “mechanical process”? If I read The Lord of the Rings and it teaches me to write Star Wars, is that a mechanical process? My brain is governed by the laws of physics, right? What if I’m a simulated brain running on a chip? What if I’m just a super-smart human and instead of reading and writing in the conventional way, I work out the LLM math in my head to generate the output?

Anything a machine does. You can simulate whatever you like, but under the law it's not human so it's mechanical.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#106

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

layer8 wrote: post #98
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A human brain doesn't need anywhere close to this volume of data, in order to be able to produce good output. > I remember talking with friends 30 years ago I'd say you're pretty old. How many years of training did it take for you to start producing good output? The leason here is we're kind of meta-trained: our minds are primed to pick up new things quickly by abstracting them and relating them to things we alread…

That's the point I think. It should be possible to require orders of magnitude less data to create an intelligence, and we are far from achieving that (including achieving AGI in the first place even with those huge amounts of data).

My point is it took a very large amount of data for a human to be able to "produce good output". Once it had its performance was of a different strata though.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#107

Post by brookst »

mountainb wrote: post #93
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That, plus the fact that Ross was a directly competing product, is what I see as really driving this decision. The "competing product" thing is probably the most extreme part of this opinion. The most important fair use factor is if the use competes with the original work, but this is generally implied to be directly competes, i.e. if you translate someone else's book from English to French and want to sell the tra…

No that is not an extreme interpretation of the fair use factors. This is a routinely emphasized factor in fair use analyses for both copyright and trademark. School fair use is different because that defense is written into the statute directly in 17 U.S.C. § 107. Also, § 108 provides extensive protections for libraries and archives that go beyond fair use doctrines. The idea that the schools are encouraging the stu…

What a world we’re in where a school using text to teach children, who will remember it, talk about it with others, likely buy it for their own children… can be framed as a “massive indirect subsidy” rather than “free advertising”.

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#108

Post by brookst »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #57
JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

Interestingly, almost the entirety of the judge's opinion seems to be focused on the question of whether the translated notes are subject to copyright. It seems to completely ignore the question of whether training an AI on copyrighted material constitutes making a copy of that work in the first place. Am I missing something? The judge does note that no copyrighted material was distributed to users, because the AI do…

How would training on copyrighted material be infringement in a way that merely producing the training material (but not iterating through training) would not be?

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#109

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

There were data brokers who literally paid people to transcribe phone books before OCR was a viable option. That was protected, as data isn't copyrightable. It isn't hard to argue that case law metadata is no different even though it includes textual descriptions (themselves taken from public documents).

Re: Thomson Reuters wins first major AI copyright case in the US

#110

Post by AlexCoventry »

JackC wrote: post #23

Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721... The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model th…

> You can definitely see how AI companies will be hustling to distinguish this from "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents." It's not quite the same, the connection is less direct, but it's not totally different.

Surely creating a general-purpose AI is transformative, though? Are you anticipating that AI companies will be sued for contributory infringement, because customers are using a general-purpose AI to compete with companies which created parts of the training data?

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