A federal appeals court in the US has sided with Thomson Reuters in its copyright fight with Ross Intelligence, upholding a lower-court finding that Ross could not claim fair use for copying Westlaw material to train its AI search product. Music Business Worldwide reports that the music industry's two main US trade bodies, the RIAA and the NMPA, had backed Thomson Reuters with a joint brief, treating the case as a test for their own lawsuits against AI music generators.
The Third Circuit's judgment affirms Judge Stephanos Bibas's order of February 2025 and makes Ross cover Thomson Reuters' costs on appeal. The reasoning is not yet public: the 32-page opinion, written by Judge Tamika Montgomery-Reeves with Judges Luis Felipe Restrepo and Emil Bove, was filed under seal and marked precedential, so it will bind district courts in the circuit once released. The parties have ten days to propose redactions before the court decides whether to unseal it.
The dispute began in 2020, when Thomson Reuters accused Ross of copying Westlaw's headnotes, the short editorial summaries of the legal points in court opinions, and using material derived from them to train a rival legal search engine. Ross shut its platform in 2021, blaming the cost of the case. Bibas threw out its fair use defence and then certified two questions for appeal: whether the headnotes and West's Key Number System are original, and whether Ross's use of the headnotes was fair.
The RIAA and NMPA filed their amicus brief in November 2025. It argued that training a model on copyrighted works to build a product that competes with them can never be fair use, and it set out the industry's wider complaint: that AI services copy nearly all the music available online, and that their output floods streaming services, displaces human work, dilutes royalty pools and leaves listeners unable to tell what they are hearing. The brief cited Suno's own court filing on the breadth of its training data, Deezer's figures on daily AI uploads, and the AI act Xania Monet as an example of money going to an invented artist. It also pointed to licensing deals between labels and AI firms, among them Stability AI, Udio, KLAY and ElevenLabs, as proof that a market for training licences exists.
The judgment does not settle the music cases. Ross's tool was not generative and returned existing court opinions, a limit Bibas stressed in 2025 when he noted that only non-generative AI was before him. Suno and Udio, both sued by the major labels in 2024, have made fair use the centre of their defence, and Udio told a New York court in August that its copying was fair use.
Much has moved around those cases since. Udio has struck licensing deals with Universal, Warner, Merlin, Kobalt, Believe and the NMPA, and Suno has its own with Warner, BMG, Believe and TuneCore, but Sony has settled with neither and Universal is still suing Suno. The two majors filed a new suit against Suno in Boston on 18 September. In the Massachusetts case both sides are expected to seek summary judgment on fair use, and Judge F. Dennis Saylor IV has moved the deadline for dispositive motions to 22 June 2027.
The RIAA and NMPA had told the court this was the first chance for a federal appeals court to rule on whether training a commercial model on the works it competes with is fair use. Hollywood also weighed in: Disney, Paramount, Sony Pictures, Universal and Warner Bros. filed a joint brief supporting Thomson Reuters.
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