The case

Thomson Reuters won their case in a copyright lawsuit against an AI company. This court decision marks a watershed for the AI industry.

Source: Neue Zürcher Zeitung 19 February 2025 & court decision

The commentary

A US court ruled that Ross Intelligence must not use Thomson Reuters’ data to train their AI – and this rulig is going to affect cases in the USA, the EU as well as Switzerland.

The court decision may mark a watershed for the AI industry as the court confirmed that content protected by copyright cannot be used to train AI models – or at least not without consent or a legal basis such as the fair-use-principle in the USA.

The court decision is likely to have far-reaching consequences:

  • For other pending cases: Open AI, Google and other AI companies have been faced with similar accusations from media companies such as the New York Times.
  • For the EU and Switzerland: There have been intensive discussions about the legal framework for AI training with copyright protected texts.
  • For the development of AI in general: AI models usually rely on huge volumes of data, so if the use of these data is limited this might hamper the development of new models.
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