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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

#151

Post by Matticus_Rex »

anon373839 wrote: post #128
pigbearpig wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" court’s ruling that West’s headnotes are copyrightable even when they merely quote a court opinion verbatim" That is the opposite of the ruling. The judge said the ones that summarize and pick out the important parts are copyrightable and specifically excludes the headnotes that quote court opinion verbatim. The judge: "But I am still not granting summary judgment on any headnotes that are verbatim copies of the ca…

You're right as far as the MSJ is concerned, and I should've been more precise. I was focusing on the dictum in the preceding paragraph (because we're discussing the broader implications of the order rather than the nuts-and-bolts of the instant motion). In that paragraph, the judge wrote: > More than that, each headnote is an individual, copyrightable work. That became clear to me once I analogized the lawyer’s edit…

Yeah, I'm willing to bet that metaphor gets called out as ludicrous by a higher court, as it has broader implications across types of editorial expression that break down when examined.

The marble from which a sculpture is carved is not itself a copyrighted work, and if we imagine it as having copyright protection, to the extent it's recognizable after editorial expression it'd have to qualify as fair use itself.

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

#152

Post by DrScientist »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #77
anon373839 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

The case looks pretty straightforward to me - they copied the notes ( human or machine doesn't really matter ) to directly compete with the author of the notes.

If you wrote a program that automatically rephrased an original text - something like the Encyclopaedia Britannica - to preserve the meaning but not have identical phrasing - and then sold access to that information on in a way that undercut the original - then in my view that's clearly ripping off the original creators of the Encyclopedia and would likely stop people writing new versions of the encyclopedia in the future if such activity was allowed.

These laws are there to make sure that valuable activities continue to happen and are not stopped because of theft. We need textbooks, we need journalistic articles - to get these requires people to be paid to work on them.

I think it's entirely reasonable to say that an LLM is such a program - and if used on sources which are sustained by having paid people work on them, and then the reformatted content is sold on in a way to under cut the original activity then that's a theft that's clearly damaging society.

I see LLM's as simply a different way to access the underlying content - the rules of the underlying content should still apply - ChatGPTs revenues are predicted to be in the billions this year - sending some of that to content creators, so that content continues to be produced, is not just right - it's in their interest.

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

#153

Post by alberto-m »

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…

> Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers

For me (Italian) this is amazing! Most Italian judges and lawyers write in a purposely obscure fashion, as if they wanted to keep the plebs away from their holy secrets. This document instead begs to be read; some parts are more in the style of a novel than of a technical document.

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

#154

Post by freeAgent »

simonw wrote: post #53

Interesting to note from this 2020 story (when ROSS shut down) that the company was founded in 2014 and went out of business in 2020: https://www.lawnext.com/2020/12/legal-research-company-ross-... The fact that it took until 2024 for the case to resolve shows how long the wheels of justice can take to turn!

My father practiced corporate tax law and regularly had cases at trial that resolved issues from 20-30 years prior.

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

#155

Post by aurizon »

habinero wrote: post #143
aurizon wrote: post #76

At the heart of this is a very greedy racket:- court reporters who 'own' the copyright to every word spoken by anyone in court that they transcribe to a transcript that they do not own the source to (judges/witnesses/lawyers/defendants in truth own it) They then milk huge fees for these transcripts and limit use/access/derivative works with huge fees. An AI verbatim transcriber would up end them, so that will be prev…

No, their work is valuable and they deserve to make money off of it. The reason why it's valuable is it's transcribed live (usually with video) and is accurate and verifiable. Words and names are spelled correctly and speakers are correctly identified. Court reporters will stop speakers and ask for spelling or to repeat words. AI transcriptions can't do that.

It is valuable, but it should not be extortionable

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

#156

Post by palmotea »

WillAdams wrote: post #51
yifanl wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the font will represent letters to look like a different letter, making it not useful to LLMs scraping the site but useful for visual readers. This would have detrimental effects to people who use screen readers or have their own stylesheets of course.

For that it would make more sense to run a routine which replaces letters with visually identical glyphs at different encoding points.

> For that it would make more sense to run a routine which replaces letters with visually identical glyphs at different encoding points.

It seems like that would be pretty easily defeatable with the similar mapping to the one used to do the replacement.

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

#157

Post by palmotea »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #18

The fair use aspect of the ruling should send a chill down the spines of all generative AI vendors. It's just one ruling but it's still bad.

> The fair use aspect of the ruling should send a chill down the spines of all generative AI vendors. It's just one ruling but it's still bad.

So, in other words, it's good.

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

#158

Post by singleshot_ »

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…

My experience using Westlaw Keycites at work is that they’re not primarily created by fishing a quote out of a holding, but instead by synthesizing a rule. If I want a summary, I read the Keycite; if I want a money quote, I root around in the case linked to the Keycite.

Have you seen different? I’m curious what area of law you practice and in what state, for comparison’s sake.

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

#159

Post by DrillShopper »

marcus0x62 wrote: post #78
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical. To the contrary, this just means companies can't make money from these models. Those using models for research and personal use wouldn't be infringing under the fair use tests.

> License what? Every available copyrighted work? Even getting a tiny fraction is not practical. Maybe the strategy is something like this: 1) Survive long enough/get enough users that killing the generative AI industry is politically infeasible. 2) Negotiate a compromise similar to the compulsory mechanical royalty system used in the music business to “compensate” the rights holders whose content is used to train th…

> figuring out what IP went into what model output is just too hard

Check out this one cool trick companies found for skirting copyright restrictions.

Lawyers HATE them!

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

#160

Post by DrScientist »

zozbot234 wrote: post #72
anon373839 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If close paraphrase can be detected, this ought to be proof enough that some non-trivial element of creativity was involved in the original text. Because purely functional and necessary elements are not protected by copyright, even when they would otherwise be creative (this is technically known as the ' scenes à faire ' case) - and surely a "quote" which is unavoidable because it factually and unquestionably is the…

Isn't the argument that the act of selecting the right quote is the real work - and the work the copier avoided in the act of copying?

You could argue that all the words are already in the dictionary - so none of them are new, you are just quoting from the dictionary in a particular order......

The reason you have people, rather than computers interpreting the law, is you can make judgements that make sense. Fundamentally these laws are there to protect work being unfairly ripped off.

What was clearly done in this case was a rip-off which damaged the original creator - everything else is dancing on the head of a pin.

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