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August
@aguest.bsky.social
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Reposted by August
free.law
Today we and other legal technology providers¹ filed² an amicus brief in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence.

It's simple: Headnotes cannot be copyrighted and ROSS's use was fair. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

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¹˒ ² See below for these excellent orgs and those that helped!
A screenshot from the summary of the argument in the PDF: “[N]o one can own the law. ‘Every citizen is presumed to know the law,’ and ‘it needs no argument to show . . . that all should have free access’ to its contents.” Georgia v. Public.Resource.Org, Inc., 590 U.S. 255, 265, (2020) (citation omitted). So too for judicial opinions. Id. (“[Judges] cannot be the ‘author[s]’ of the works they prepare ‘in the discharge of their judicial duties.’”). The same should be true of the headnotes at issue in this case, which serve a discrete and limited purpose as often near-verbatim summaries and verbatim quotes that faithfully and accurately describe a specific point of law from a judicial opinion. Individual headnotes are uncopyrightable because they lack the originality required for copyright protection, and the district court erred in finding to the contrary. And, because there are no or only a few other ways to concisely and precisely express the specific individual legal points stated in an opinion, the expression in a headnote cannot be distinguished from the underlying legal idea it aims to convey. The district court therefore also erred by rejecting the merger defense. Another screenshot: But even if headnotes like those in Westlaw’s platform were copyrightable, the district court erred in concluding on summary judgment that Appellant ROSS Intelligence’s indirect use of those headnotes as inputs to train a new artificial intelligence (AI) legal research tool was not fair use. Instead, a correct application 2of the four fair use factors should have concluded that ROSS’s use was highly transformative and would not serve as a market substitute for headnotes. A third: The district court came to that conclusion after analogizing the headnote author’s editorial judgment “to that of a sculptor.” D.E. 770 at 7. The court’s logic is: just as a sculptor takes an uncopyrightable block of marble and creates copyrightable expression by choosing what to cut away and what to leave in place, Appellees’ Westlaw creates protectable expression by taking a court opinion and “identifying which words matter and chiseling away the surrounding mass.” Id. The sculpture analogy, however, crumbles upon closer inspection. Its most fundamental flaw is the notion that a court opinion is somehow equivalent to an untouched, blank block of marble. Not so. The more accurate analogy is that a judicial opinion is the final product of a judge taking a block of marble and carefully, skillfully chiseling away the surrounding mass to create a host of precise details, each of which reveal a specific point of law or fact. The resulting opinion looks nothing like the initial block of marble; it is instead a highly sculpted work made up entirely of many discrete bits of expressive (but uncopyrightable) content that are very directly tailored to the specific case.2
September 29, 2025 at 10:30 PM
Reposted by August
design-law.bsky.social
Thank you to @prmalone.bsky.social, Nina Srejovic, and @stanfordlaw.bsky.social Juelsgaard Clinic Certified Law Students August Gebhard-Koenigstein & Yiran (Isabella) Yang for filing this amicus brief on behalf of myself, @ericgoldman.bsky.social, Betsy Rosenblatt & @emptydoors.bsky.social:
Juelsgaard Clinic Brief Fights Abusive IP Litigation Scheme | Stanford Law School
Imagine being one of the hundreds of small businesses and merchants selling closet hooks, along with many other products, online. One day, you discove
law.stanford.edu
February 14, 2025 at 3:44 PM