“Groundbreaking Ruling: How a Landmark Case is Redefining Copyright in the Age of AI”
The case arose out of the surreptitious copying of the entire Westlaw database (after having been denied a license) by a company that wanted to create an arguably competing product. Unlike some of the generative AI cases, there was no claim that the AI’s output included the copyrightable content. As the Court noted, this was not about generative AI. This case was purely about training.
A large portion of the decision concerns the question of whether the defendant copied material that is copyrightable, given that West’s copied “headnotes” and “Key Number System” are factual and based on the unarguably public domain caselaw. I will largely skip the discussion of copyrightability as it is particularly related to these facts, although I did enjoy the almost poetic nature of the inquiry:
