A judge ruled in favour of Thomson Reuters, saying that a law firm’s use of their legal content to train an artificial intelligence model went against US copyright laws.
Thomson Reuters has won an early battle in court about whether artificial intelligence (AI) programs can train on copyrighted material.
The media company filed a lawsuit in 2020 against now-defunct legal research firm Ross Intelligence. In it, Thomson Reuters argues the company used their own legal platform Westlaw to train an AI model without permission.
In his decision, judge Stephanos Bibas affirmed that Ross Intelligence was not permitted under US copyright law, known as the “fair use doctrine,” to use the company’s content in order to build a competing platform.
The “fair use” doctrine of US laws allows for limited uses of copyrighted materials such as for teaching, research, or transforming the copyrighted work into something different.
“We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favour,” according to a statement from Thomson Reuters to Euronews Next.
“The copying of our content was not ‘fair use'”.
Ross Intelligence did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Euronews Next.
Thomson Reuters’ win comes as a growing number of lawsuits have been filed by authors, visual artists, and music labels against developers of AI models over similar issues.
What links each of these cases is the claim that tech companies ingested huge troves of human writings to train AI chatbots to produce human-like passages of text, without getting permission or compensating the people who wrote the original works.
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