I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.
If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.
A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?
I don’t think that’s the best argument in favor of AI if you cared to make that argument. The infringement wasn’t for their parsing of the law, but for their parsing of the annotations and commentary added by westlaw.
If processing copy written material is infringement then what they did is definitively infringement.
The law is freely available to read without westlaw. They weren’t making the law available to everyone, they were making a paid product to compete with the westlaw paid product. Regardless of justification they don’t deserve any sympathy for altruism.
A better argument would be around if training on the words of someone you paid to analyze an analysis produces something similar to the original, is it sufficiently distinct to actually be copy written? Is training itself actually infringement?