Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI Sued in Federal Court Over Microsoft Copilot
Summary
In January, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI were sued in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California in connection with AI product, Microsoft Copilot. According to the complaint, Copilot is “an AI-based product that promises to assist software coders by providing or filling in blocks of code using AI.” The complaint, filed as a class action on behalf of authors of code available on GitHub, also alleges that the training data for Copilot “includes data in vast numbers of publicly accessible repositories on GitHub,” and alleges violations of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Lanham Act, unfair competition laws, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) and a breach of GitHub’s terms of service regarding licenses and privacy. The complaint alleges that AI programs violate GitHub’s requirement to display copyright information when making use of the original code because programs using Copilot may generate code that is identical to licensed code used to train Copilot. Microsoft and OpenAI moved to dismiss the complaint.
