Legal research giant Thomson Reuters has filed a lawsuit against legal research start-up ROSS Intelligence alleging that it surreptitiously stole content from Westlaw to build its own competing legal research product. Thomson Reuters lawsuit against ROSS comes just two days after it ended a related lawsuit against LegalEase. In that stipulation, LegalEase agreed to an injunction that prevents it from reproducing Westlaw content, using bots to access content, and sharing its Westlaw credentials.
Interesting the Thomson Reuters files infringement suits in the US, while suits for the same cause of action are pending against it in Indian Courts.
How did the Indian Courts deal with the infringement issue?
In an appeal filed by Thomson Reuters South Asia against the injunction granted by the District Judge, Lucknow on29th March, 2013 in favour of Eastern Book Company, a Division Bench of Sudhir Agarwal and Ravindra Nath Mishra disposed of the appeal relying on the Supreme Court’s order in Relx India Pvt. vs Eastern Book Company (2017)
The Supreme Court in the case ordered that the appellants will be at liberty to publish, sell and distribute the raw judgments of the Supreme Court of India and other courts obtained from whichever source along with their own head-notes, editorial notes, paraphrasing, explanatory notes, etc. as laid down in Eastern Book Company vs D.B. Modak(2008)
Further, the High Court also directed the Trial Court to expedite the hearing of the pending suit.
The Supreme Court in Eastern Book Company vs D.B. Modakhad granted copyright protection to Supreme Court Cases (SCC).
Upon scrutiny of the judgments in the Westlaw database, copyright protected elements of the EBC vs D.B. Modak case were found in the versions of judgments of the Supreme Court in Westlaw. Eastern Book Company then sued Thomson Reuters for copyright infringement of its law reportSupreme Court Cases. However, the District Judge of Lucknow granted the ad-interim injunction.
The court allowed the application for temporary injunction moved by the plaintiffs saying that during the pendency of the Suit, the defendants, their assigns and business franchisees, licencees, distributors, agents etc. are restrained from infringing the copyrights in the literary work of the plaintiffs in their law report “Supreme Court Cases” (SCC). The courts also refrained them from selling, distributing or otherwise making available to the public, through their websites on the internet or by any other means, anycopies of its law report and data bases which infringe the copyrights of the plaintiffs in and to the law reports titled Supreme Court Cases (SCC).
