Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are accused of copyright infringement for using the license code to build the Copilot tool.
Copilot is an artificial intelligence tool developed by GitHub and OpenAI to assist Visual Studio Code users with code autocompletion. It is built on the OpenAI Codex algorithm, which is called a “descendant of GPT-3” (a popular neural network model capable of generating text that sometimes does not differ from human writing). The system was trained on terabytes of publicly available source code taken from GitHub, as well as on example texts in English.
When it launched in 2021, the technology immediately attracted many accusations of copyright infringement. In November 2022, programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick, along with the law firm of Joseph Savery, filed a class-action lawsuit alleging that the tool was created through software piracy on an unprecedented scale. Butterick and a legal team later filed a second lawsuit on behalf of two anonymous developers with similar allegations, which Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are now seeking to dismiss.
In a statement, Microsoft and GitHub said that “the complaint should not be sustained due to two critical deficiencies: the lack of damages and a valid claim”; and OpenAI counters that the plaintiffs “assert a large number of claims that do not allege violations of known rights laws.” The companies stress that the lawsuits refer to “hypothetical events” and do not describe exactly how the tool harmed the plaintiffs.
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Copilot does not remove anything from the open source code. Rather, the tool helps developers write code and generates suggestions based on the cumulative knowledge it has gained from publicly available code,” Microsoft and GitHub said in a statement.
The company’s plaintiffs are called those who “undermine the principles of open source,” demanding “its injunction and multibillion-dollar profits.”
A court hearing on the rejection of the claim will be held in May. The plaintiffs, represented by the Joseph Savery law firm, have not yet responded to journalistic inquiries.
Despite potential legal issues preventing the creation of AI-based tools, Microsoft has pledged billions of dollars to expand its long-term partnership with OpenAI. The company is also rumored to be adding AI technology to Word, PowerPoint, and Outlook, and reportedly wants to add ChatGPT to the Bing search engine.
Google panics over ChatGPT – by the end of 2023, the company plans to show its chatbot for online search and more than 20 AI projects
With other companies also exploring AI, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI aren’t the only ones facing legal trouble. Earlier this month, the law firm of Joseph Savery filed another lawsuit, alleging that AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally obtaining artists’ work from the Internet. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI, claiming that the Stable Diffusion tool illegally copied images from their site.
Source: The Verge
