ROSS Artificial Intelligence will petition the Supreme Court to review a Third Circuit Court of Appeals decision that favored Thomson Reuters in a copyright dispute, the company announced through its counsel at White & Case.
Yar Chaikovsky, a partner at the international law firm representing ROSS, released a statement expressing disagreement with the Third Circuit's ruling and confirming the company's intent to seek certiorari review before the nation's highest court.
The case centers on intellectual property rights in legal research and artificial intelligence applications. ROSS, which develops AI-powered legal research tools, has contested the Third Circuit's interpretation of copyright law as applied to its dispute with Thomson Reuters, a dominant player in legal publishing and research databases through its Westlaw platform.
The Third Circuit, which governs appeals from district courts in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware, issued its ruling in favor of Thomson Reuters. That decision prompted ROSS to pursue Supreme Court review, a path available to parties who believe the lower court committed legal error of national importance.
Certiorari petitions face steep odds. The Supreme Court receives roughly 7,000 petitions annually but grants only about 70, or roughly one percent. The Court typically accepts cases presenting genuine splits in circuit authority, novel questions of constitutional or statutory interpretation, or issues of exceptional national importance. ROSS must convince at least four justices that its case meets these criteria.
The dispute has implications extending beyond the parties involved. It touches core questions about copyright protection in AI training, the scope of fair use doctrine, and how courts should treat automated access to published legal materials. These issues affect the broader artificial intelligence and legal technology industries, which increasingly rely on large datasets to train machine learning models.
Thomson Reuters operates one of the legal profession's most valuable assets in Westlaw, a subscription-based legal research platform used by attorneys nationwide. The company has aggressively protected its proprietary content and database compilation rights against automated competitors seeking to index or analyze its materials at scale.
ROSS Intelligence positions itself as a disruptive alternative to traditional legal research platforms, using artificial intelligence to analyze cases and provide legal research summaries. The company has positioned its technology as offering efficiency gains and cost reductions compared to established players like Thomson Reuters and LexisNexis.
The Third Circuit ruling apparently rejected ROSS's arguments regarding copyright scope or fair use protection for its automated analysis activities. The decision reinforced Thomson Reuters' position that copyright law protects against unauthorized computational access to its databases even when that access serves transformative purposes.
Whether the Supreme Court grants certiorari remains uncertain. The case would need to present questions transcending the immediate commercial dispute between two legal technology companies. ROSS faces the burden of demonstrating that the Third Circuit's copyright analysis conflicts with Supreme Court precedent or creates an impermissible circuit split requiring Supreme Court resolution.
The petition deadline and Supreme Court's response timeline remain subject to applicable federal rules governing appellate procedure. If the Court declines review, the Third Circuit's decision becomes final, establishing binding precedent in its three-state jurisdiction and providing persuasive authority elsewhere.