DAN MCLAUGHLIN , National Review; Copyright Protects Against Training AI on Legal Headnotes
"When is training artificial intelligence on somebody else’s work a copyright violation? The Third Circuit federal court of appeals decided to draw a line in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence, Inc.
Judicial opinions can’t be copyrighted, because they are official government documents. But from the earliest days of the republic, they were published not by the courts but in privately compiled law books sold for profit. West Publishing, for many years, has published volumes of opinions with numbers that become their official citations, and has used a proprietary “keynote” system (complete with its own Dewey Decimal System–like numerical classifications by topic) for summarizing at the front of an opinion its conclusions on various points of law. In its books and later its Westlaw system for computerized legal research (which itself has been around since the early 1990s), West has always taken very seriously the unique, copyrighted value that these headnotes (what West brands as “keynotes”) add to the opinions themselves. Indeed, the Supreme Court noted as far back as Callaghan v. Myers (1888) that judicial opinions are not copyrightable but that a private publisher can get “a copyright for the volume which will cover the matter which is the result of his intellectual labor” such as “head-notes.”"
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