Developers suing GitHub Copilot suffer major setback in court

A judge has dismissed nearly all claims leveled by a group of developers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI in a copyright case. The suit will be filed in 2022As previously reported register. In Court order In the case opened last week, a California judge left only two claims: one that accused the companies of violating open-source licenses, and another alleging breach of contract.

The original lawsuit made 22 claims against the three, accusing them of violating copyright laws by allowing the AI-powered GitHub Copilot coding assistant to train developers on their work. GitHub owner Microsoft uses OpenAI’s technology to operate the tool. The three companies asked to be thrown out of court lawsuit in January, but Judge John Tiger denied his request.,

However, Judge Tiger’s latest ruling has dealt a blow to the allegation that GitHub Copilot violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by suggesting code without giving proper credit. Although the court previously ruled that the code suggested by Copilot was not close enough to its original source, this issue has been raised in the revised version of the complaint. GitHub’s duplication detection filterWhich users can toggle to “detect and suppress” Copilot suggestions that match public code found on GitHub.

The amended lawsuit argues that GitHub gives users the option to “get the same code” when the filter is turned off. Citing a study It shows how AI models can “remember” and reproduce parts of their training data, which could potentially contain copyrighted code.

This did not hold up in court, as Judge Tiger determined that the code that GitHub allegedly copied from the developers did not substantially resemble their original work. He also referred to a portion of the cited study that stated that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits recompiled code under benign circumstances.” Judge Tiger dismissed the allegation with prejudice, meaning the developers cannot re-file the claim. The court also dismissed the requests for punitive damages, as well as monetary relief in the form of unjust enrichment.

This doesn’t mean the lawsuit is over. The lawsuit is likely to continue, with developers making claims of breach of contract and open-source license violations.