GitHub’s Copilot sued over software piracy

• Software developers became concerned about Copilot’s potential to infringe their rights through its code suggestions.
• 11 pop­u­lar open-source licenses that all require attri­bu­tion of the author’s name and copy­right, which are not included in reproduced codes of GitHub.
• GitHub announced that they will be introducing several new capabilities to GitHub Copilot to continue delivering responsible innovation.

Programmer, designer, and lawyer Matthew Butterick sued Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI on 3 November with software piracy claims. GitHub, released in June 2022, is a paid service that uses machine learning to analyze public repositories to be able to transform natural language into code snippets for various programming languages. However, Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm believe that it is violating the terms of licenses.

Open-source laundering

Copilot’s use of public open-source code repositories doesn’t attribute the author’s name and copyright, which are required by most of the popular open-source licenses, including MIT, GNU, and Apache. This method is called open-source laundering by some programmers. Joseph Saveri said,

« After Copilot launched, some developers and programmers became concerned about Copilot’s potential to infringe their rights through its code suggestions. It appears Microsoft is profiting from others’ work by disregarding the conditions of the underlying open-source licenses and other legal requirements. »

By removing these components, GitHub’s service is violating licenses, according to the case. According to the lawsuit, the codes that are reproduced by Copilot can be traced back to open-source repositories or licenses. The class-action complaint can be found on the githubcopilotlitigation.com website. According to the website, GitHub has violated,

• GitHub’s own terms of ser­vice and pri­vacy poli­cies;
• DMCA § 1202, which for­bids the removal of copy­right-man­age­ment infor­ma­tion;
• the Cal­i­for­nia Con­sumer Pri­vacy Act;
• and other laws giv­ing rise to related legal claims.

« This is the first step in what will be a long jour­ney. As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US chal­leng­ing the train­ing and out­put of AI sys­tems. It will not be the last. AI sys­tems are not exempt from the law. Those who cre­ate and oper­ate these sys­tems must remain account­able. If com­pa­nies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to dis­re­gard the law, they should not expect that we the pub­lic will sit still. AI needs to be fair & eth­i­cal for every­one. If it’s not, then it can never achieve its vaunted aims of ele­vat­ing human­ity. It will just become another way for the priv­i­leged few to profit from the work of the many. »

On the other hand, GitHub announced that there will be changes in Copilot in 2023. The company will introduce several new capabilities to continue delivering responsible innovation.