Welcome to the Tech meme right home for Wednesday, February 12th, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough today.

The first big AI legal ruling has come down, and it might not be good news for AI startups.

Apple launches its biggest health study yet. This one weird trick that tech companies are using

to make their AI spending seem not so expensive, and Matt Levine on the whole Elon buying Open AI thing.

Here's what you miss today in the world of tech.

Thompson Reuters has won the first major U.S. AI copyright ruling against fair use in a case filed in May

2020 against legal research AI startup Ross Intelligence. Quoting Wired, in 2020, the media and

technology conglomerate filed an unprecedented AI copyright lawsuit against the legal

AI startup Ross Intelligence. In the complaint, Thompson Reuters claimed the AI firm reproduced materials from its legal research firm Westlaw. Today, a judge ruled in Thompson

Reuters' favor, finding that the company's copyright was indeed infringed by Ross

intelligence's actions. None of Ross's possible defenses hold water, I reject them all,

wrote U.S. District Court of Delaware Judge Stephanos Bibas in a summary judgment.

The Fair Use Doctrine is a key component of how AI companies are seeking to defend themselves

against claims that they use copyrighted materials legally. The idea underpinning fair use is

that sometimes it's legally permissible to use copyrighted works without permission,

for example, to create parody works or in non-commercial research or news production. When determining whether fair use applies, courts use a four-factor

test, looking at the reason behind the work, the nature of the work, whether it's poetry,

non-fiction, private letters, etc., the amount of copyrighted work used, and how the use

impacts the market value of the original. Thompson Reuters prevailed on two of the four factors,

but Bebas described the fourth as the most important and ruled that Ross, quote, meant to compete

with Westlaw by developing a market substitute, end quote. Now, worth noting that this is an AI tool that is

not generative, this was not an LLM. But James Gimmelman, an internet law professor, told Wired,

...