The law is no longer a brooding omnipresence in the sky; it now dwells in legal- research platforms. Thomson Reuters owns one of the biggest of those platforms: Westlaw. D.I. 752-1 at 4. Users can pay to access its contents, including “case law, state and federal statutes, state and federal regulations, law journals, and treatises.” Id. “Westlaw also contains editorial content and annotations,” like the headnotes here.

I really hate how the law is supposedly public but there’s absurdly expensive proprietary info APIs that you can’t actually be well informed about what’s legal without them and is gatekept from everyone outside of the legal profession.

Ross, a new competitor to Westlaw, made a legal-research search engine that uses artificial intelligence. Id. To train its AI search tool, Ross needed a database of legal questions and answers. Id. at 5. So Ross asked to license Westlaw’s content. Id. But because Ross was its competitor, Thomson Reuters refused.

They have such a monopoly on the data that they can effectively prohibit research that isn’t in their interests, that sucks.