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Third Circuit affirms in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS: The Court Gets Merger Wrong and Does a Disservice to Fair Use
On September 29, 2026, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit affirmed the district court’s grant of partial summary judgment to Thomson Reuters in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence. The panel (Judges Restrepo, Montgomery-Reeves, and Bove, with Judge Montgomery-Reeves the author of the opinion) held that Westlaw’s headnotes are copyrightable and that ROSS’s use of them to train an AI legal research tool was not fair use.
The court insists that “this is no more than an ordinary copyright case” (Ross COA Opinion, p. 2). While we do think the effect of this case will be limited on other…
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