Evidence of Copyright Invariance in the Westlaw Headnotes: Judge Bibas’s Benchmark on Ross’s Anonymous Use of a Search Engine

Thomson Reuters sued over Ross’s use of its Westlaw search engine. A lot of the material that Westlaw organizes is not copyrighted and is also interspersed with its own content. Westlaw headnotes, which are summaries of points of law written by human editors, are a signature feature meant to make Westlaw subscription attractive to lawyers.

Chris Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who focuses on intellectual property law, concurs that this will complicate AI companies’ fair use arguments, although it could vary from plaintiff to plaintiff. “It puts a finger on the scale towards holding that fair use doesn’t apply,” he says.

As reported previously by Wired, today Judge Bibas wrote in his decision, “None of Ross’s possible defenses holds water” against accusations of copyright infringement, and ultimately rejected Ross’s fair-use defense, relying heavily on the factor of how Ross’s use of copyrighted material affected the market for the original work’s value by building a direct competitor.

Westlaw editorial content is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent, so we were pleased the court granted summary judgment in our favor. The copying of our content was not “fair use.”

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is a senior editor and follows the news across technology, culture, and policy. He joined The Verge in 2021 after several years covering news at Engadget.