Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI want the court to throw out a proposed class action lawsuit accusing the companies of extracting licensed code to create GitHub’s AI-powered Copilot tool. as previously reported by Reuters. in a pair filings Filed in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI say the claims outlined in the lawsuit do not hold water.
Things came to a head when programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, teamed up with the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm to file a proposed class action lawsuit last November, alleging that the tool is based on “software piracy on a unprecedented scale.” Butterick and his legal team later introduced a second proposed a class action lawsuit on behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which is the lawsuit that Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want dismissed.
As noted in the filing, Microsoft and GitHub say that the lawsuit “faults on two intrinsic flaws: lack of injury and lack of a viable claim,” while OpenAI similarly says that the plaintiffs “allege a number of claims that do not they allege violations of knowable legal rights.” The companies argue that the plaintiffs rely on “hypothetical events” to present their claim, and say they do not describe how the tool harmed them personally.
“Copilot does not remove anything from the publicly available body of open source code,” Microsoft and GitHub state in the filing. “Rather, Copilot helps developers write code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from all the knowledge gleaned from public code.”
Additionally, Microsoft and GitHub continue to claim that the plaintiffs are the ones “undermining open source principles” by seeking “an injunction and a billion-dollar windfall” in connection with “software they voluntarily share as open source.” “. ”
A court hearing to dismiss the lawsuit will take place in May, and law firm Joseph Saveri did not immediately respond to the edgerequest for comments.
With other companies also investigating AI, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI aren’t the only ones facing legal trouble. Earlier this month, the law firm Butterick and Joseph Saveri filed another lawsuit alleging that AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally extracting artists’ work from the Internet. . Getty Images is also suing Stability AI over claims that the company’s Stable Diffusion tool pulled images from the site “illegally.”
