A judge has dismissed the majority of claims in a copyright lawsuit filed by developers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
The lawsuit was initiated by a group of developers in 2022 and originally made 22 claims against the companies, alleging copyright violations related to the AI-powered GitHub Copilot coding assistant.
Judge Jon Tigar’s ruling, unsealed last week, leaves only two claims standing: one accusing the companies of an open-source license violation and another alleging breach of contract. This decision marks a substantial setback for the developers who argued that GitHub Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s technology and is owned by Microsoft, unlawfully trained on their work.
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Despite this significant ruling, the legal battle is not over. The remaining claims regarding breach of contract and open-source license violations are likely to continue through litigation.
This article is over a month old, with a variation of it published by the Verge on July 9th.
Oh. I’m sorry if this was discussed previously… I only returned to lemmy a few weeks ago and didn’t see the story covered yet.
I think this community accepts posts from weeks, months, and even years older. I think it also accepts repeat articles. It’s just the format of the article makes it seem like it was published today, not months ago. It’s an ongoing legal case, and has progressed further from the the Verge’s reporting of the order from 06/24/2024.
This is an aspect of the German court system that is LEAGUES more sensible than the US - they have certified subject matter experts in a ton of domains that work with courts to help meaningfully inform judicial decisions. The system isn’t perfect (no system is), but it’s a damn sight better than what the US generally does. I’m categorically unable to name a justice or court jurisdiction anywhere in the US that consistently makes well-informed and incisive decisions on anything in the computer hardware / EE or computer science fields.
Consistently? Not that I can think of either but there was that one judge in the Oracle v Google Java case that I believe learned enough programming to call BS on oracle’s claims.
The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”
“Rarely” is not zero. This looks like it’s opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:
- Find OSS code you want to copy
- Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
- Copy code into your commercial product
- When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code
Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.
In fact, I wonder if there’s a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.
With an automated refactoring step to pretend it’s really not derivative work despite being extremely derivative
- Immediately lose the case because nobody is claiming that when copilot does emit copyrighted code verbatim it is magically stripped of copyright protections.
That is, I fact, exactly what the judge in this case is saying.
Lol no. Please show me where he says that.
Sounds like it’s time to start training code-writing models on leaked Microsoft source code. Don’t worry, it’s not like it’ll “emit memorized code”.
Well. Aren’t those two exactly what open source licensing is about?
Either you follow the license, or you are in violation of copyright.
Hmmm is it copyright or breach of contract? It’s a valid point.
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It’s interesting.
I imagine this isn’t even theoretical, because a set of AI remastered Star Wars prequels is probably going to happen, and Disney is definitely going to claim to own it and to to suppress it.
Eventually someone is going to train an AI on Microsoft’s business practices and beat them at their own game.
