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.

Still, this ruling is a blow to AI companies, according to Cornell University professor of digital and internet law James Grimmelmann: “If this decision is followed elsewhere, it’s really bad for the generative AI companies.” Grimmelmann believes that Bibas’ judgement suggests that much of the case law that generative AI companies are citing to argue fair use is “irrelevant.”

Chris Mammen, a partner at Womble Bond Dickinson who focuses on intellectual property law, concurs that this will complicate AI companies’ fair use arguments, although it could vary from plaintiff to plaintiff. “It puts a finger on the scale towards holding that fair use doesn’t apply,” he says.

This is another Delaware court judgment Big Tech won’t like, but a lot of media companies will like. I wonder if we’ll see not a wholesale abandonment of Delaware like some articles suggest, but that companies who want to take from others will leave for jurisdictions more willing to let them do whatever they want while companies who have more to protect will stay?