According to the lawsuit, open-source software can be modified or distributed for free by any users who abide by a licence, which often calls for crediting the original developer.
A proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that Microsoft Corp., Microsoft’s GitHub Inc., and OpenAI Inc. unjustly profited from using open-source code to train their artificial intelligence systems cannot be upheld, the companies told a San Francisco federal court.
The businesses claimed in court documents submitted on Thursday that the complaint, which was made by a collection of anonymous copyright owners, did not sufficiently detail their claims and that GitHub’s Copilot system, which recommends lines of code to programmers, made fair use of the source code. Requests for comments on Friday went unanswered by representatives of OpenAI and the plaintiffs.
In November, two unnamed plaintiffs filed a lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI on behalf of a group of individuals who had copyrights to code on the platform. They claimed that without adhering to the requirements of the open-source licencing, the companies used GitHub repositories to train Copilot, and that Copilot illegitimately copies their code.
Microsoft and OpenAI claimed on Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to file the lawsuit because they failed to make an argument that their conduct by the firms caused them to suffer particular harm. Additionally, the corporations claimed that the complaint did not specify which works protected by copyright they misappropriated or which contracts they broke.
A spokesperson for GitHub, an online platform for housing code, states Friday that the company has “been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start” and that its motion is “a testament to our belief in the work we’ve done to achieve that.”
