Pillsbury IP and Appellate Lawyers Tapped to Represent ROSS Intelligence in a High-Profile Copyright Infringement Appeal

The Pillsbury team includes Kayvan Ghaffari in San Francisco, who represented ROSS as lead counsel in the case at a prior firm, Silicon Valley partner Anne Voigts, who leads Pillsbury’s global Appellate practice, and Silicon Valley Intellectual Property partner Ranjini Acharya. Each brings significant AI litigation and copyright experience to the case, including in one of the most consequential fair use cases in recent memory.

“The court’s decision will have massive implications not just for our company ROSS, but for the future of artificial intelligence innovation in the United States,” said ROSS Intelligence co-founder Andrew Arruda. “We firmly believe that the facts and the law are on our side and that training AI models of all kinds must be protected under the fair use doctrine. The approach ROSS pioneered represents the foundational layer that underpins all AI systems, past, present and future. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Given these high stakes, we wanted the ‘best of the best’ representing our side, and few firms can offer the mix of market-leading AI, intellectual property and appellate experience that Pillsbury can."

The case, Thomson Reuters Enterprise Centre GMBH and West Publishing Corp. v. ROSS Intelligence Inc., was filed in the U.S. District Court in Delaware in May 2020 and predated many other high-profile copyright and fair use cases involving AI. According to recent coverage, the case alleges that ROSS violated the Thomson Reuters’ copyrights by using judicial opinion summaries or headnotes, which Thomson Reuters claims are copyrightable, to train ROSS' AI-powered legal service.