In May 2020, the media and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters sued a small legal AI startup called Ross Intelligence, alleging that it had violated US copyright law by reproducing materials from Westlaw, Thomson Reuters’ legal research platform. As the pandemic raged, the lawsuit hardly registered outside the small world of nerds obsessed with copyright rules. But it’s now clear that the case—filed more than two years before the generative AI boom began—was the first strike in a much larger war between content publishers and artificial intelligence companies now unfolding in courts across the country. The outcome could make, break, or reshape the information ecosystem and the entire AI industry—and
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