EFF: “Westlaw, the world’s largest legal research service, is very likely to face antitrust liability. A federal court has ruled that ROSS Intelligence, a tiny rival offering new research tools (which Westlaw forced out of business with a copyright infringement suit) could proceed with claims that Westlaw uses exclusionary and anticompetitive practices to maintain its monopoly over the legal research market.  The ruling is a significant step in an antitrust case about Westlaw’s conduct as an entrenched incumbent. The company controls 80 percent of the market for legal research tools and maintains a massive, impossible-to-duplicate database of public case law built over decades. It faces few major competitors. Westlaw doesn’t license access to its database, which means that it’s difficult for another company to offer new and innovative online tools for searching case law or other follow-on products and services.  The potential ramifications of this case are huge. The outcome could boost the case for competitive compatibility (comcom), the ability of challengers to build on the work of entrenched players like Westlaw to create innovative and useful new products. More prosaically, it could improve public access to court records. The U.S. District Court for the District of Delaware in April refused to dismiss an antitrust claim against Westlaw by the now-defunct legal research company ROSS Intelligence. ROSS developed a new online legal research tool using artificial intelligence (AI), contracting with an outside company for a database of legal cases sourced from Westlaw. Westlaw sued ROSS for copyright infringement, accusing it of using AI to mine the Westlaw database as source material for its new tool. Though the database is mainly composed of judicial opinions, which can’t be copyrighted, Westlaw long maintained that it holds copyrights to the page numbers and other organizational features. ROSS went out of business less than a year after Westlaw filed suit.  Despite going out of business, ROSS pressed ahead with a countersuit, claiming Westlaw and its parent company, Thomson Reuters Corporation, violate antitrust law by requiring customers to buy their online search tool to access its database of public domain case law, unlawfully tying the tool to the database to maintain dominance in the overall market for legal search platforms…”