‘This story begins with our country’s founding’ writes Third Circuit Judge Montgomery-Reeves in Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence . Referring to the much older history of American commercial legal publishing, Montgomery-Reeves frames this dispute as ‘no more than an ordinary copyright case’ that involves issues surrounding originality and fair use. Technology might have changed, but it would seem that an AI-powered legal search engine ( ROSS AI Search ), trained on material derived from Westlaw headnotes, confronts a similar challenge: balancing access to information against a publisher’s right to control future uses of reporting. Facts Thomson Reuters commenced copyright infringement proceedings against ROSS Intelligence in May 2020. It argued that ROSS AI Search could retrieve relevant case law when asked plain-language legal questions because it was trained on material derived from Westlaw headnotes owned by Thomson Reuters. After Thomson Reuters denied ROSS a Westlaw license, ...