Philadelphia, 30 September 2026 – A US federal appeals court has upheld a copyright ruling against Ross Intelligence in a dispute over material used to develop an AI-powered legal search service. The Third Circuit rejected Ross’s fair-use position and left a lower-court win for the owner of the Westlaw legal-research platform in place. The decision matters to companies buying or training on proprietary data, but its precise reasoning should not be overstated while the full appellate opinion is not publicly available.
The dispute concerns Westlaw headnotes, human-written summaries of points of law drawn from court decisions. Judicial opinions themselves are public, but the case concerns the claimed protection of editorially prepared material associated with those opinions. Ross had argued that using material to build a competing search product qualified as fair use. The appellate disposition, as publicly reported, did not accept that argument on this record.
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