A Case Study of Intellectual Property Law in the Use of Westlaw Headnotes in Artificial Intelligence: A Summary Judgment in Ross Against Fair Use

Ross turned the annotations and headnotes into data about the relationships among legal words to feed into his artificial intelligence, as described by Bibas. Ross purchased 25,000 Bulk Memos of questions and answers written by lawyers using Westlaw headnotes that it used for training data from LegalEase, according to the ruling.

Chris Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who focuses on intellectual property law, concurs that this will complicate AI companies’ fair use arguments, although it could vary from plaintiff to plaintiff. “It puts a finger on the scale towards holding that fair use doesn’t apply,” he says.

Judge Bibas rejected Ross’ fair-use defense, as well as all of his other possible defenses, due to how Ross used copyrighted material.

We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and concluded that Westlaw’s editorial content created and maintained by our attorney editors, is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent. The copying of our content was not “fair use.”

is a senior editor following news across tech, culture, policy, and entertainment. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.