Those memos link cases to bits of law they rely on.
The third party did that by scraping Thompson Reuters Westlaw.
Now Ross is upset they have a lawsuit on their hands...
https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...
> 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.”
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)
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.
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)
please complete your argument, if that's the case.
from where i am standing, I see no wrongdoing of any kind.