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Comment by finolex1 | Hacker News Reader

From the linked article in their blog post:

> To substantiate this, ROSS released emails that it says show that when LegalEase did once send unsolicited Westlaw content, ROSS immediately told them not to send such proprietary information.

The first email is from the ROSS engineer who discovered the data, alerting the project lead. He said, “they [LegalEase] include a lot of what seems to be Westlaw headnotes, footnotes, and other stuff. If it’s possible for them to send us cases without that it would be much better as that is added noise.”

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So they knew that Westlaw data was there, but only asked for headnotes and footnotes and other 'noise' to be removed, not for the Westlaw data as a whole to be removed. That supports the lawsuit.

Westlaw’s individual bits of core content are largely not owned by Westlaw and unprotected by its copyrights. It should be possible to carefully extract that in a manner that does not violate copyright law.

For cases, I would think headnotes and footnotes would be the only proprietary Westlaw data. The case itself is content written by the court.

Yes, but I'm sure westlaws argument is that if you scrape them and strip off the headers and footers, it's still their content (ie. Collected, filtered, arranged by them).

If the content is otherwise public and produced by someone else, in what sense is it "theirs" ? I doubt they'd have any claim under copyright law.

This might be the code that applies here.

27.404-3(a)(2): Generally, a contracting officer should grant the contractor's request [to assert copyright] when copyright protection will enhance the appropriate dissemination or use of the data unless the -

(iii): Data are of the type that the agency itself distributes to the public under an agency program; (ed: court cases are distributed to the public via Pacer)

ref: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/48/27.404-3

Reading the e-mail from above, it would seem more likely that the request to remove head- and footnotes wasn't followed, or at least not with the care necessary to remove most infringing content. Alternatively, they could allege some sort of TOS violation. Even if the scraping was done by a third party, Ross probably has an account with them and would be bound by their terms.

There is no "database" copyright in the US. (The EU has it, among others). So they couldn't assert copyright on the raw "collection". If they are smart/devious, they may have modified these documents in such a way that it does not change the legal meaning, but clears the barrier for a derivative work. Adding cartoons would be my idea, but it's too easy to remove. Adding some fancy formatting might do the trick, or changing the citation style.

as a general rule you should be able to use the case with the proprietary footnotes etc. removed. However I am not sure how many rights one has in the U.S to publish court cases, it might depend on jurisdiction (as so many things do in the U.S)

In Denmark some cases need to be anonymized before being made available through a service like WestLaw, and perhaps the same might apply to some American cases - if so not only the footer and headers and notes would be WestLaw proprietary but perhaps also the anonymized form of the case (arguable)

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