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Comment on Thomson Reuters Wins First Major AI Copyright Case in the US

TheOccasionalTachyon@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

It’s not what this case about. Reuters runs a service called Westlaw that provides access to a bunch of legal materials, including summaries and explanations of cases that are written by its lawyers. Ross Intelligence wanted access to those summaries, so that it could train AI to make a competing product. As you can imagine, Reuters said no to this.

So, Ross bought summaries from someone else, another company that did have access to Westlaw, and used those to train its AI. Today, the court found (among other things), that a few thousand of the summaries that Ross’s AI produced are way too similar to Westlaw’s summaries for it to be a coincidence. Ross had argued (among other things) that its summaries were only similar because they were describing the law, and Reuters doesn’t/can’t have a copyright on the law. The court rejected this argument, saying, essentially “Yeah, it’s true that Reuters doesn’t have a copyright on the law, but it does have a copyright on the summaries that its lawyers write. It takes skill and judgement to decide which parts of a law or decision are important for people doing legal research, and you clearly copied many of them.”

This isn’t an exhaustive discussion of all the issues covered in the opinion, because I’m a sleepy lawyer, but it’s the most important part.

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grue@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I’m not a lawyer, but I’m also not entirely unfamiliar with this sort of thing. In particular, I remember Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org and thus do not accept at face value the notion that the data in question being “summaries and explanations of cases” necessarily means Westlaw is in the right. Even if the Westlaw materials aren’t “officially” incorporated into the law itself the way Georgia did, that doesn’t mean Westlaw should necessarily be entitled to monopolize them if the judicial system is relying upon them to inform its decisions.

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- ricecake@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
  
  Though the headnotes were drawn directly from uncopyrightable judicial opinions, the court analogized them to the choices made by a sculptor in selecting what to remove from a slab of marble. Thus, even though the words or phrases used in the headnotes might be found in the underlying opinions, Thompson Reuters’ selection of which words and phrases to use was entitled to copyright protection. Interestingly, the court stated that “even a headnote taken verbatim from an opinion is a carefully chosen fraction of the whole,” which “expresses the editor’s idea about what the important point of law from the opinion is.” According to the court, that is enough of a “creative spark” to be copyrightable. In other words, even if a work is selected entirely from the public domain, the simple act of selection is enough to give rise to copyright protection.
  
  The court distinguished cases holding that intermediate copying of computer source code was fair use, reasoning that those courts held that the intermediate copying was necessary to “reverse engineer access to the unprotected functional elements within a program.” Here, copying Thompson Reuters’ protected expression was not needed to gain access to underlying ideas.
  
  natlawreview.com/…/court-training-ai-model-based-…
  
  It sounds like the case you mentioned had a government entity doing the annotation, which makes it public even though it’s not literally the law.
  Reuters seems to have argued that while the law and cases are public, their tagging, summarization and keyword highlighting is editorial.
  The judge agreed and highlighted that since westlaw isn’t required to view the documents that everyone is entitled to see, training using their copy, including the headers, isn’t justified.
  
  It’s much like how a set of stories being in the public domain means you can copy each of them, but my collection of those stories has curation that makes it so you can’t copy my collection as a whole, assuming my work curating the collection was in some way creative and not just “alphabetical order”.
  
  Another major point of the ruling seems to rely on the company aiming to directly compete with Reuters, which undermines the fair use argument.
  
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Dkarma@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
Which is funny cuz this is exactly what the cops do to prosecute citizens. they buy 3rd party data they’re not legally entitled to gather themselves.

Interesting to see this possibly be used against prosecutions in the future where the cops collected 3rd party data.

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antonim@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

Today, the court found (among other things), that a few thousand of the summaries that Ross’s AI produced are way too similar to Westlaw’s summaries for it to be a coincidence.

This is probably just inevitable when your dataset is not large enough. I would be interested in seeing the LLM’s output and the original texts; I do remember the early ChatGPT producing some borderline copies of sentences that you could find online (with one or two words changed).

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nsrxn@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago
I don’t trust that judge’s ability to determine whether they were copied if it wasn’t verbatim. which is what copyright is. to control an idea, you need a patent.

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