Submission + - Microsoft want court to toss GitHub lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source (reuters.com)
guest reader writes: Microsoft Corp, Microsoft's GitHub Inc and OpenAI Inc told a San Francisco federal court that a proposed class-action lawsuit for improperly monetizing open-source code to train their artificial-intelligence systems cannot be sustained.
Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of people who own copyrights to code on GitHub, sued Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in November. They said the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source licensing terms, and that Copilot unlawfully reproduces their code.
Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions.
From the class action complaint:
Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of people who own copyrights to code on GitHub, sued Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI in November. They said the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source licensing terms, and that Copilot unlawfully reproduces their code.
Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions.
From the class action complaint:
GitHub and OpenAI have offered shifting accounts of the source and amount of the code or other data used to train and operate Copilot. They have also offered shifting justifications for why a commercial AI product like Copilot should be exempt from these license requirements, often citing "fair use."
It is not fair, permitted, or justified. On the contrary, Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall. It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so.
