Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit

According to Reuters, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to reject a proposed class action case accusing the corporations of ripping licensed code to construct GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool.

Copilot, which will be available in 2021, uses OpenAI technology to produce and propose lines of code immediately within a programmer’s code editor.

Soon after its introduction, the program, which is trained on publicly available GitHub code, raised worries about whether it violated copyright rules.

Butterick and his legal team later launched a second proposed class action case on identical grounds on behalf of two anonymous software engineers, which Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want to be rejected.

According to the document, Microsoft and GitHub contend that the lawsuit “fails on two inherent defects: absence of damage and lack of an otherwise valid claim,” while OpenAI contends that the plaintiffs “allege a grab bag of allegations that cannot state an infringement of cognizable legal rights.”

In the complaint, Microsoft and GitHub assert that “Copilot withdraws nothing from the corpus of open source code available to the public.”