AI programming tool Copilot is sued for copyright infringement, and Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI ask the court to dismiss the case

News on January 29, Reuters reported earlier that Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action lawsuit accusing the companies of scraping authorized code to build GitHub’s artificial intelligence-powered Copilot tool . In two documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday, Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI said the claims outlined in the lawsuit did not stand.

#Launched in 2021, Copilot leverages OpenAI’s technology to generate and suggest lines of code directly in programmers’ code editors. The tool, which is trained on public code from GitHub, raised concerns shortly after its release that it violated copyright laws.

Programmer and attorney Matthew Butterick, working with the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm, filed a class-action lawsuit last November claiming that the tool committed massive copyright infringement. Butterick and his legal team later filed a second proposed class action lawsuit on behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI now want to dismiss.

Microsoft and GitHub noted in the filing that the lawsuit suffers from two essential flaws: a lack of harm and a lack of other viable claims. OpenAI similarly said the plaintiffs "failed to allege a violation of an identifiable legal right." The companies argued that the plaintiffs relied on "hypothetical events" to make their claims and said they failed to describe how they were personally harmed by the tools.

Microsoft and GitHub said in the filing: "Copilot does not pull anything from open source code available to the public. Instead, Copilot helps developers write code based on all the information it collects from public code. Knowledge Generation Suggestions." Microsoft and GitHub also claim that the plaintiffs "undermine open source principles."

IT House has learned that a court hearing to dismiss the lawsuit will be held in May.

Microsoft has pledged billions of dollars to extend its long-term partnership with OpenAI. The company is also considering bringing artificial intelligence technology to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook. It is also said to want to add artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to Bing .

Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI aren't the only ones facing legal troubles as other companies also work on artificial intelligence. Earlier this month, law firms Butterick and Joseph Saveri filed another lawsuit claiming that AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt violated copyright law by illegally scraping artists' works from the Internet. Getty Images also sued Stability AI, saying the company's Stability Proliferation tool "unlawfully" scraped images from the site.

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