Thomson Reuters scored an early victory in an AI-related copyright case against Ross Intelligence.The ruling highlights fair use limits. Fair use is at the center of ongoing AI copyright lawsuits.Legal experts say the case differs from other litigation involving generative AI firms.Content and technology conglomerate Thomson Reuters this week scored the first big win in a USartificial intelligence-related copyright case.A federal judge's Delaware ruling in favor of Thomson Reuters on the legal doctrine of "fair use," however, does not mean that the slew of authors and publishers who have sued generative AI companies like OpenAI for copyright infringement can expect to have the same kind of success, tech law experts told Business Insider.The ruling, though, could have an influence on the outcome of those cases that are currently winding through the courts, one of the tech law experts said.Thomson Reuters sued the now-shuttered legal AI startup Ross Intelligence in 2020, arguing that Ross infringed its copyrights when the startup used content from Thomson Reuters' Westlaw legal research database to create a competing platform that uses artificial intelligence.In his revised ruling Tuesday, US District Court Judge Stephanos Bibas shot down Ross' fair use defense and instead granted a summary judgment for Thomas Reuters on fair use."None of Ross's possible defenses holds water. I reject them all," Bibas wrote in the ruling, in which he explained that in his 2023 opinion in the case, he denied summary judgment on fair use.The question of fair use is at the heart of major ongoing copyright lawsuits against generative AI firms. Companies like OpenAI have pointed to the fair use exemption to copyright laws in order to justify their use of copyrighted material to train AI models.Legal experts told BI that there are key nuances in Thomson Reuters' case against Ross and the blockbuster litigation involving generative AI firms one being that the Thomson Reuters case doesn't have to do with generative AI technology.Bibas made that distinction in his ruling, writing, "Ross was using Thomson Reuters's headnotes as AI data to create a legal research tool to compete with Westlaw. It is undisputed that Ross's AI is not generative AI (AI that writes new content itself). Rather, when a user enters a legal question, Ross spits back relevant judicial opinions that have already been written." Ross's AI was not generative AI, the judge said. Qi Yang/Getty Images Mark Bartholomew, a University at Buffalo law professor, told BI that he does not think the ruling will have a dramatic effect on the other major AI-related copyright cases since it's just one opinion of a lower court and "neglects some of the most important fair use case law.""Still, the plaintiffs in those upcoming cases, like The New York Times, have to be happy with the outcome here," Bartholomew said, adding that those plaintiffs will likely "trumpet this decision in their legal briefs."The New York Times sued OpenAI for copyright infringement in 2023. The New York Times declined to comment for this story. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.One of the other ways that the Thomson Reuters case is different from other ongoing AI-related copyright infringement litigation is that Ross Intelligence was a direct competitor of Thomson Reuters, Bartholomew pointed out."In many of the other copyright AI cases to be decided, the defendant is accused of copying to train the AI for an arguably new purpose that does not directly compete with the original," Bartholomew said. "That may allow this case to be distinguished, allowing the AI platforms to argue they still satisfy the fair use defense regardless of the holding in Thomson."Harry Surden, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School, said that he fears judges overseeing other AI copyright lawsuits may not take into account the differences between the cases.The ruling is "likely to confuse judges and others on the issue of generative AI, but there are significant differences that are very subtle and most people will miss," Surden said, explaining, "It's both a different technology and the company was acting kind of duplicitously here."For those reasons, Surden said the ruling should not have much influence on the ongoing AI copyright cases. He thinks it will anyway."Judges tend not to be experts in copyright law or generative AI, so I think they're likely to miss a lot of these nuances, and I think it will, unfortunately, have an effect on other cases," said Surden.James Gatto, a partner at the law firm Sheppard Mullin who co-leads the firm's AI industry team, told BI it remains to be seen what kind of ripple effect, if any, the ruling in favor of Thomson Reuters will have."Fair use is a fact-specific inquiry unique to each case," said Gatto.Though the judge's decision does not address generative AI, Gatto said it "reinforces the limits of fair use, particularly in cases where copyrighted material is used for non-transformative purposes to develop a competing product.""The court easily determined that Ross's use was commercial, as Ross sought to profit from the copyrighted material without paying the customary price," said Gatto.Meanwhile, Thomson Reuters hailed the legal win, saying in a statement to BI: "We are pleased that the court granted summary judgment in our favor and concluded that Westlaw's editorial content created and maintained by our attorney editors, is protected by copyright and cannot be used without our consent. The copying of our content was not 'fair use.'"Representatives for Ross did not immediately respond to a request for comment.