Can AI Be Trained With Copyrighted Material?

A U.S. jury will soon be asked to decide whether using unauthorized copyright-protected works for the purpose of training a machine learning model can constitute fair use (the U.S. equivalent of the fair dealing defence in Canada).

The District Court for the District of Delaware recently denied a motion for summary judgment in a copyright infringement action brought by Thomson Reuters, the owner of the Westlaw legal-research platform, against the startup Ross Intelligence and ruled that the core issues of this case will need to be decided by a jury.

Thomson Reuters initiated its lawsuit in 2020 accusing Ross Intelligence of copying Westlaw's headnotes and Key Number System to build a competing AI-based legal search tool. After being unable to secure a licence from Westlaw to use its headnotes (short summaries of points of law that appear in court opinions) to train its machine learning model, Ross Intelligence turned to a third-party legal research company to