Einstein was wrong when he said World War IV would be fought with sticks and stones.[1]
When the cleansing fires rain down from the firmament and the smoldering ruins of our civilization are all that remain as a testament to our fleeting, ignoble existence on this rock, World War IV will not be friend against foe, brother against sister, or Ebeneezer Scrooge against the downtrodden wielding stone-age tools.
As I learned after being mistakenly added to a highly sensitive Signal chat group, the future of warfare will be fought by multi-million-dollar legal technology conglomerate against multi-million-dollar legal technology conglomerate with artificial intelligence (AI).
Here at Hull & Hull LLP, we have been reporting on the latest developments in AI’s transformative role in the legal industry. The sophistication of AI tools available to us has grown exponentially in recent years thanks to the billions of dollars in investment capital received and will be received by AI start-ups.
I mean what with AI’s having been hailed by some as a pivotal moment in our human history right up there with that time Kim Kardashian was taking selfies while her sister was about to be hauled off to the county jail, it was a foregone conclusion that a clash between legal technology companies over the usage of AI would have to take place.
Thomson Reuters Is Successful on Partial Summary Judgment
In what is perhaps the first major case of its kind to deal with AI copyright, the United States District Court in Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH v. Ross Intelligence Inc. granted partial summary judgment motion brought by Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GmbH (“Thomson Reuters”) against Ross Intelligence Inc. (“Ross”) for copyright infringement.
Ross, a competitor seeking to develop a “natural language search engine” for legal research. Ross sought to train its new product by requesting a license from Thomson Reuters to use Westlaw’s content, which was refused. Ross then contracted with LegalEase to obtain training data in the form of “Bulk Memos,” which, as explained by the Court, are lawyers’ compilations of legal questions with good and bad answers. LegalEase gave those lawyers a guide explaining how to create those questions using Westlaw headnotes, while clarifying that the lawyers should not just copy and paste headnotes directly into the questions. Those headnotes were short summaries of the case in question. LegalEase also sent Ross Intelligence 91 legal topics from Westlaw’s Key Number System and 500 judicial opinions including Westlaw’s headnotes, key numbers and other annotations.
The Court rejected Ross’s various defences and granted partial summary judgment in favour of Thomson Reuters on direct copyright infringement. It concluded that all four fair-use factors weighed in favour of Thomson Reuters.
Unanswered Questions
While this case was decided in the United States, it raises some pressing concerns for Canadian estate and trusts practitioners. Canada does not presently have any regulatory framework specific to AI. Though, the Federal Parliament is currently considering the Artificial Intelligence and Data Act. That leaves us with a number of questions that we still face for which there is presently no clear, authoritative answer:
- How should we treat the ownership and copyright of AI-assisted works?
- What sort of copyright restrictions apply to the usage of copyrighted materials, if any, in a situation where, for example, a lawyer uses copyrighted materials to train their AI tools in preparing for examinations for discovery?
- What formal training can firms provide for their employees?
- Are there any measures firms can take to minimize copyright infringement when using AI?
For other recent developments on the usage of AI in the legal field, please visit these posts:
- AI Hallucinations in the Courtroom: Lessons from Ko v. Li by Mark Lahn
- AI Hallucinations in the Courtroom Part 2: Recent Developments in Ko v. Li by Shawnee Matinnia
- Digital Ghosts – When AI Becomes a Messenger for the Dead by Margarita Grup
[1] The conventional attribution of this quote to famed German theoretical physicist Albert Einstein is apocryphal.