Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI ask court to dismiss AI copyright lawsuit

Microsoft, GitHub and Open AI filed a US court request to dismiss a lawsuit that accuses them of violating Open Source licenses and seeking $9 billion in compensation for GitHub Copilot. Lawyers for Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI allege that allegations of license violations and compensation claims are baseless.

The companies contend that the lawsuit lacks evidence of damage and lacks substantiation for claims, including examples of violations of legal rights. Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI allege that the plaintiffs are relying only on “hypothetical events” and GitHub Copilot did not personally harm them.

Lawyers for the companies argue that the lawsuit does not identify specific copyrights that GitHub Copilot violated through unauthorized use, or contracts and licenses violated in creating the artificial intelligence tool.

Microsoft says the allegations of copyright infringement are unfounded and contrary to the doctrine of fair use, which allows copyrighted material to be used in certain situations. Microsoft and GitHub cite a 2021 US Supreme Court ruling confirming that Google’s use of Oracle source code to build the Android operating system is fair use.

According to Microsoft and GitHub, Copilot does not remove anything from the publicly available open source code, but only helps developers write code by suggesting suggestions based on information the tool has learned from the publicly available code.

The tech companies, through their lawyers, said in a court filing in response that the plaintiffs were undermining the principles of open source by seeking an injunction and billions in compensation for open source software. The lawsuit against GitHub Copilot is scheduled for May.

Recall that in early November 2022, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer programmer, sued Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in California for violating Open Source project licenses and infringing on the rights of programmers to the GitHub Copilot neural network assistant. The developer is seeking $9 billion in compensation from US companies.

GitHub Copilot currently uses millions of lines of code from public GitHub repositories to generate code, and can translate natural language into code in dozens of programming languages. The neural assistant does this work automatically, without analyzing or considering the licensing rules of open source projects such as GPL, Apache or MIT, which require attribution and specific copyrights when using the code.

Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI have taken precautions in the development of Copilot. The tool has been configured to remove any reference to Open Source licenses from generated code, even if it copies snippet code longer than 150 characters from a specific repository. The system does not indicate the authorship of the source code fragment.

Developer Butterick suggests that every time Copilot produces an effectively illegal result, that neural network tool violates the DMCA law three times by distributing licensed material without attribution, copyright notices and license terms. The developer believes that during the 15 months of Copilot, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI, about 3.6 million times violated US laws and caused damage to the Open Source community in the amount of $ 9 billion.

Butterick worries that Copilot may further degrade the Open Source community, and as a result, the quality of the code used in the training data of a system that is not capable of generating code on its own will decline.