Though headnotes have enough creative elements to be subject to copyright protection, they are relatively less creative than many other works. The court considered this factor to be less important ...

In Tuesday’s ruling, Bibas found that Ross may have infringed on more than 2,200 headnotes. To decide damages, a jury will determine whether any of Thomson Reuters’ copyrights have expired.

Did Ross Copy Thomson Reuters’ Headnotes? The court went through the exercise of comparing each of the 2,830 Bulk Memos against both the Thomson Reuters headnotes and the full judicial opinions.

The judge asked for additional summary judgment briefing both on Thomson Reuters’ contention that ROSS infringed on its copyrighted headnotes and Key Number System and on ROSS’s fair-use defense.

Revising his opinion from the 2023 summary judgment ruling, Judge Bibas now found enough originality in Westlaw’s headnotes to find no genuine dispute on that fact.

Bibas ruled that ROSS infringed on 2,243 Westlaw headnotes that “summarize key points of law and case holdings,” according to the court filing.

Ross had earlier claimed its use of the headnotes as “innocent infringement,” which Judge Bibas dismissed on Tuesday, stating that Westlaw’s headnotes clearly bear a copyright notice.

Fair use ruling concerns use of Westlaw headnotes Legal research firm Ross Intelligence sought to use content from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform, to train an AI search tool.

Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw, a major legal research platform containing case law, statutes, regulations, and editorial content like headnotes. Westlaw organizes this content using its copyrighted ...