Third Circuit: ROSS training AI on Westlaw headnotes is not fair use
On September 29, 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit upheld partial summary judgment in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS, ruling that Westlaw's headnotes are original, copyright-protected content and that ROSS's use of them to train its AI legal research tool was not fair use. It is the first federal appellate ruling on fair use in AI training, but the court distinguished the case's non-generative tool from generative-AI cases such as Bartz v. Anthropic and In re: OpenAI, calling it an ordinary copyright case. With ROSS shut down, the dispute may never reach the Supreme Court, making this a likely final ruling in the six-year case.
This is the first federal appellate word on fair use in AI training, and its reasoning on protected editorial layers and an emerging training-data licensing market could be cited in later AI copyright cases.
2026年9月29日，美国第三巡回上诉法院在汤森路透诉ROSS案（Thomson Reuters v.ROSS）中，维持了地区法院部分简易判决的判决：Westlaw的头注（headnotes）是具有原创性、受版权保护的内容，ROSS利用它们来训练AI法律研究工具不构成合理使用。这是联邦上诉法院就AI训练中的合......
本文来自微信公众号： Internet Law Review ，作者：张颖
2026年9月29日，美国第三巡回上诉法院在汤森路透诉ROSS案（Thomson Reuters v.ROSS）中，维持了地区法院部分简易判决的判决：Westlaw的头注（headnotes）是具有原创性、受版权保护的内容，ROSS利用它们来训练AI法律研究工具不构成合理使用。
这是联邦上诉法院就AI训练中的合理使用问题作出的首个判决。但同时，法官在判决中明确本案的涉案工具属于非生成式，并认为“这不过是一起普通的版权案件”，将其与其他更著名的生成式AI版权案例相区分开。
#Thomson Reuters#Westlaw#ROSS Intelligence#LegalEase#US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit#US Department of Justice#Anthropic#OpenAI#Authors Alliance