Here's the full decision, which (like most decisions!) is largely written to be legible to non-lawyers: <a href="https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.72109/gov.uscourts.ded.72109.770.0.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.ded.721...</a><p>The core story seems to be: Westlaw writes and owns headnotes that help lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. Ross paid people to translate those headnotes into new text, trained an AI on the translations, and used those to make a model that helps lawyers find legal cases about a particular topic. In that specific instance the court says this plan isn't fair use. If it was fair use, one could presumably just pay people to translate headnotes directly and make a Westlaw competitor, since translating headnotes is cheaper than writing new ones. And conversely if it isn't fair use where's the harm (the court notes no copyright violation was necessary for interoperability for example) -- one can still pay people to write fresh headnotes from caselaw and create the same training set.<p>The court emphasizes "Because the AI landscape is changing rapidly, I note for readers that only non-generative AI is before me today." But I'm not sure "generative" is that meaningful a distinction here.<p>You can definitely see how AI companies will be hustling to distinguish this from "we trained on copyrighted documents, and made a general purpose AI, and then people paid to use our AI to compete with the people who owned the documents." It's not quite the same, the connection is less direct, but it's not totally different.