Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI ask court to dismiss AI copyright lawsuit

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI have teamed up to appeal a class action complaint accusing the companies of scrubbing code to create GitHub's AI-powered Capilot tool.

Capilot is a tool powered by OpenAI technology that offers you lines of code directly in the editor. The tool, which learns from publicly available GitHub code, raised concerns about whether it violated copyright laws shortly after its release.

Against this backdrop, lawyer Matthew Butterick teamed up with the legal team of Joseph Saveri to file a class action lawsuit claiming that the tool relies on "software piracy on an unprecedented scale". Butterick and his team of lawyers later filed a second proposed class action on behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI want to dismiss.

“Copilot withdraws nothing from the body of open source code available to the public,” Microsoft and GitHub claim in the filing. “Rather, Copilot helps developers write code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from the entire body of knowledge gleaned from public code."

In addition, Microsoft and GitHub continue to argue that the plaintiffs are those who "undermine the principles of open source" by seeking "an injunction and multi-billion dollar profits" on "software they willingly share as open source."

In any case, the court hearing will take place in May, but for now, let's wait for the news.

Source: The Verge