Document Type

Court Filing

Publication Date

9-29-2025

Abstract

This amici curiae brief, filed in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH and West Publishing Corp. v. ROSS Intelligence Inc. before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, argues that Thomson Reuters failed to state a viable claim for copyright infringement against ROSS Intelligence. The amici—law professors specializing in copyright and technology—contend that Westlaw’s headnotes are uncopyrightable factual summaries of judicial opinions and that the West Key Number System has long been in the public domain. The brief distinguishes between AI “pretraining” and “fine-tuning,” emphasizing that ROSS’s fine-tuning process relied on expert-created materials rather than wholesale copying. It cautions that accepting Thomson Reuters’s theory would imperil ordinary legal research and innovation in AI development. Finally, it rejects emerging “dilution” theories of copyright infringement, asserting that market competition from non-infringing AI outputs is not actionable under established copyright principles.

Publication Title

SSRN

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