• Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas issued a continuance without setting a new date for the trial.

• The judge invited both parties to resubmit summary judgment motions.

• This is the first major case to test whether copyright owners can prevent AI companies from training their models with copyrighted works.

The highly anticipated AI copyright and fair use trial in Thomson Reuters v. Ross Intelligence, set to begin August 23, has been postponed indefinitely, according to a Bloomberg Law report.

The judge overseeing the trial, Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephanos Bibas, sitting by designation in the U.S. District Court in Delaware, ordered a continuance on Thursday, August 22, following a request filed by Ross earlier in the week. The judge did not set a future date.

What’s next: “I invite Thomson Reuters to renew its motions for summary judgment on those issues and Ross to renew its cross-motion for summary judgment on fair use,” Judge Bibas said, according to LawSites. 

“Thus, the parties may submit two sets of additional briefing on (1) copyrightability, validity, and infringement, and (2) the defense of fair use,” the judge added.

What the case is about: Thomson Reuters, the parent company of Westlaw, alleges that Ross Intelligence unlawfully used its legal texts to train an AI-powered legal research tool. 

Reuters says Ross hired a third-party contractor to unlawfully copy Westlaw content—including its proprietary Key Number System and case headnotes—in order to train Ross’s own AI-driven natural language legal search engine. 

What the defense says: Ross insists that its use of the headnotes was transformative under the first fair use factor: the company converted the plain language into numerical data, which it then fed into a machine learning algorithm to teach the AI model about legal language.

Why it matters: Filed back in 2020, when generative AI was still in its incipient phase, this is the first major trial to determine whether AI companies can use copyrighted materials to train their AI models, a Copyright Lately report says.

No matter the outcome in this case, it will be pivotal for the future of AI as it will likely clarify the extent to which AI developers can use existing content under fair use or need explicit licenses.