Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are facing legal challenges in a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool. The complaint was filed last November by programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick and the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm, alleging that the tool relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.”
The companies have responded to the accusations, submitting filings to a San Francisco federal court. Microsoft and GitHub say the complaint “fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim,” while OpenAI similarly says the plaintiffs “allege a grab bag of claims that fail to plead violations of cognizable legal rights.” The companies argue that the plaintiffs rely on “hypothetical events” to make their claim and that they don’t describe how they were personally harmed by the tool.
“Copilot withdraws nothing from the body of open source code available to the public,” Microsoft and GitHub claim. “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.” Microsoft and GitHub also claim that the plaintiffs are the ones who “undermine open source principles” by asking for “an injunction and a multi-billion dollar windfall” about the “software that they willingly share as open source.”
The court hearing to dismiss the suit will take place in May, and Joseph Saveri Law Firm has not yet responded to The Verge’s request for comment.
This is not the only legal challenge facing companies working in AI. Earlier this month, Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed another lawsuit alleging that AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally scraping artists’ work from the internet. Additionally, Getty Images is suing stability AI over claims that the company’s Stable Diffusion tool “unlawfully” scraped images from the site.
With AI becoming an increasingly popular field, these legal challenges highlight the need for companies to be mindful of the potential consequences of their actions and ensure that they are operating within the bounds of the law. Whether Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI will be able to successfully defend themselves against these allegations remains to be seen, but the outcome of this case will have important implications for the wider AI industry.
