Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI have asked a court to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit accusing them of stealing licensed code to create GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool.
Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI were accused of violating copyright law by allowing Copilot, a code-generating AI system trained on billions of lines of public code, to regurgitate licensed code snippets without providing credit in a class action lawsuit.
The companies told a federal court in San Francisco that the lawsuit over the open-source code they use to train their AI systems is unsustainable. According to the companies, the complaint, needs to be more specific in its allegations. Furthermore, the companies claim that GitHub’s Copilot system, which recommends lines of code to programmers, makes fair use of the source code it recommends.
In November, the plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI, claiming to represent people who own copyrights to code on GitHub. They claim that the companies trained Copilot using code from GitHub in violation of open-source licensing terms, resulting in Copilot illegally reproducing their code.
Microsoft and GitHub say the complaint “fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim,” while OpenAI similarly says the plaintiffs “allege a grab bag of claims that fail to plead violations of cognizable legal rights.” The companies argue that the plaintiffs rely on “hypothetical events” to make their claim and say they don’t describe how they were personally harmed by the tool.
The sources for this piece include an article in TheVerge.