A judge has dismissed the majority of claims in a copyright lawsuit filed by developers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

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The lawsuit was initiated by a group of developers in 2022 and originally made 22 claims against the companies, alleging copyright violations related to the AI-powered GitHub Copilot coding assistant.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.

  • troed@fedia.io
    0·
    21 days ago

    Well. Aren’t those two exactly what open source licensing is about?

    Either you follow the license, or you are in violation of copyright.

      • ugo@feddit.it
        0·
        21 days ago

        Copyleft licenses are explicitly leveraging copyright laws.

        So if the output of an “AI” is not subject to copyright, and the input material is also not subject to copyright, I can train a model so it outputs a byte-for-byte copy of, say, a marvel movie, and said copy is copyright free, yes?

        • rebelsimile@sh.itjust.works
          0·
          21 days ago

          If you make a byte-for-byte copy of something why would you think copyright would not apply? If you listened to the dialogue of a Marvel movie, wrote it down line for line and so happened that the stage directions you wrote were identical to those in the movie, congrats, you’ve worked your way into a direct copy of something that’s under copyright. If you draw three circles by hand in exactly the right way, you might get a Mouse coming after you. If you digitally render those circles in Photoshop, same idea[/concept, yes I know one is a trademark issue].

          • ugo@feddit.it
            0·
            21 days ago

            Looks to me like the ruling is saying that the output of a model trained on copyrighted data is not copyrighted in itself.

            By that logic, if I train a model on marvel movies and get something that is exactly the same as an existing movie, that output is not copyrighted.

            It’s a stretch, for sure, and the judge did say that he didn’t consider the output to be similar enough to the source copyrighted material, but it’s unclear what “close enough” is.

            What if my model is trained on star wars and outputs a story that is novel, with different characters with different voices. That’s not copyrighted then, despite the model being trained exclusively on copyrighted data?

        • MajorHavoc@programming.dev
          0·
          21 days ago

          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.