Filed in November, the initial complaint [PDF] alleged GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI violated copyright, contract, privacy, and business laws, among others, by using public source code culled from GitHub to create the OpenAI’s Codex machine learning model and GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.

Software developers have bristled that Codex and Copilot were created from their code, and sometimes reproduce it, without explicit permission or concern for the terms under which they licensed their work. And some of them have sued over it.

The judge rejected the defense motion to dismiss the plaintiffs’ claim that Codex’s capacity to reproduce code represents a breach of software licensing terms. He also rejected the defense effort to toss a claim under Section 1202(b) of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act that Copilot and Codex reproduce copyrighted code without the required copyright management information – author, title, owner, terms and conditions, and so on.

So litigation, at the very least, can be expected to continue based on those allegations.

The ruling found other aspects of the complaint less compelling. Tigar dismissed the civil conspiracy allegations against the companies, as well as the unidentified plaintiffs’ demand for declaratory relief – essentially a judicial declaration of the plaintiffs’ rights.

Read more:

Claburn, T. (2023, May 12). GitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI fail to wriggle out of Copilot copyright lawsuit. The Register. https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/12/github_microsoft_openai_copilot/