October 1, 2026
Association of American Publishers Welcomes the Third Circuit Decision in Favor of Plaintiff in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence
On September 30, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit released its opinion upholding the decision of the district court finding that ROSS Intelligence’s unlicensed use of Thomson Reuters’s copyrighted material to train a competing AI legal research platform was not fair use. Thomson Reuters filed suit in May 2020 when ROSS used Westlaw headnotes to train its AI platform. The district court in Delaware issued the first copyright opinion on the question of AI training, now being litigated along with other questions in approximately 150 cases in the United States.
“Rightsholders are entitled to equitable participation in the AI market, and we are pleased to see this milestone decision by the Third Circuit uphold the basic principles of fairness that will be central to a future in which innovation and creativity work together for all stakeholders and the public,” says AAP President and CEO Maria A. Pallante. “As the court indicates, AI is not the first technology to exploit expressive works of authorship, and ROSS usurped Thomson Reuters’s right to enter a derivative market for licensing headnotes for AI training.”
“As we explained in our amicus brief filed in November 2025, fair use cannot ‘ignore markets to which rightsholders are fundamentally entitled and are both exploiting and preparing to exploit.’ Here, on the fourth fair use factor, market effect of the use, the Third Circuit correctly noted that the licensing market for AI training not only exists but is ‘rapidly developing.’ Critically, the court noted that ROSS’s use harmed the value of works that draw users to the rightsholder’s platform and rejected the argument that a rightsholder’s decision not to license ‘does not disprove that a market exists to do so.’
We applaud the court for this powerful precedent, which supports the premise that a robust licensing market among developers and rightsholders is essential to achieving sustainable and ethical progress in AI technology.”
The opinion of the Third Circuit can be found here.