COPYRIGHT—3d Cir.: Startup’s copying of Westlaw headnotes for AI training was not fair use, (Oct 1, 2026)

Law Firms Mentioned:Crowell & Moring LLP | Morris Nichols Arsht & Tunnell LLP

Organizations Mentioned:ROSS Intelligence Inc. | Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH

By Thomas Long, J.D.

Impact of first appellate court decision on AI and copyright fair use is limited because generative AI was not involved, and defendant’s use of headnotes for competing research product was not transformative.

A tech startup’s copying of Westlaw headnotes to use for training of a competing artificial-intelligence driven legal-research platform was not protected by the doctrine of fair use from copyright infringement claims, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has held. The appellate court affirmed a district court decision in favor of Westlaw operator Thomson Reuters on its copyright infringement claims against the startup. The court also determined that Westlaw headnotes have the requisite originality for copyright protection. “The undisputed evidence reflects that Thomson Reuters’s materials possess a creative spark, and ROSS aspired to be a direct competitor by using them for a highly similar purpose,” said the court. “We therefore hold that Thomson Reuters’s materials are copyrightable and that [ROSS]’s use was not fair.” The case has been closely watched as the first appellate determination on fair use in the AI context. However, the Third Circuit panel cautioned that this case was an “ordinary” copyright case with limited applicability to the many pending copyright cases involving generative AI technologies, which were not at issue here (Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc., No. 25-2153 (3d Cir. Sep. 29, 2026)).

Copyright dispute. The dispute centers on the Westlaw legal-research platform, owned and operated by Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH, and use by tech startup ROSS Intelligence Inc. of the database contents to create a “natural language search engine” using machine learning and AI. Along with the content of non-copyrighted judicial opinions, statutes, and other government documents, ROSS used headnotes authored by Thomson Reuters employees that accompanies and summarized the key issues of court cases. Thomson Reuters asserted copyright ownership in its headnotes, and it contended that [ROSS]’s conversion of Thomson’s copyrighted material into machine-readable data suitable for training its AI constituted copyright infringement. Thomson filed suit in the District of Delaware in May 2020.

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