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Above the Law · October 13, 2026 · On the brief until October 27, 2026

‘No More Than An Ordinary Copyright Case’: Third Circuit Unseals Its Opinion In Thomson Reuters Case Against ROSS

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Training a search engine to retrieve judicial opinions

The Third Circuit ruled that Westlaw headnotes have copyright protection and that ROSS Intelligence infringed them to train a legal search engine. The court rejected a fair use defense because ROSS built a commercial substitute and bypassed freely available court opinions. The decision prevents legal technology developers from using proprietary editorial summaries as unlicensed training data for retrieval tools.

Summary written by AI Business Lens with an AI model from the article at lawnext.com. It is not the article, and the publisher has not reviewed it. For publishers.

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Instructors can examine whether copying proprietary summaries is legally excusable when the underlying court opinions are freely available.

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