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As projected here back in October, there is now a class action lawsuit, albeit in its earliest stages, against Microsoft over its blatant license violation through its use of the M$ GitHub Copilot tool. The software project, Copilot, strips copyright licensing and attribution from existing copyrighted code on an unprecedented scale. The class action lawsuit insists that machine learning algorithms, often marketed as "Artificial Intelligence", are not exempt from copyright law nor are the wielders of such tools.
The $9 billion in damages is arrived at through scale. When M$ Copilot rips code without attribution and strips the copyright license from it, it violates the DMCA three times. So if olny 1% of its 1.2M users receive such output, the licenses were breached 12k times with translates to 36k DMCA violations, at a very low-ball estimate.
"If each user receives just one Output that violates Section 1202 throughout their time using Copilot (up to fifteen months for the earliest adopters), then GitHub and OpenAI have violated the DMCA 3,600,000 times. At minimum statutory damages of $2500 per violation, that translates to $9,000,000,000," the litigants stated.
Besides open-source licenses and DMCA (§ 1202, which forbids the removal of copyright-management information), the lawsuit alleges violation of GitHub's terms of service and privacy policies, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA), and other laws.
The suit is on twelve (12) counts:
– Violation of the DMCA.
– Breach of contract. x2
– Tortuous interference.
– Fraud.
– False designation of origin.
– Unjust enrichment.
– Unfair competition.
– Violation of privacy act.
– Negligence.
– Civil conspiracy.
– Declaratory relief.
Furthermore, these actions are contrary to what GitHub stood for prior to its sale to M$ and indicate yet another step in ongoing attempts by M$ to undermine and sabotage Free and Open Source Software and the supporting communities.
Previously:
(2022) GitHub Copilot May Steer Microsoft Into a Copyright Lawsuit
(2022) Give Up GitHub: The Time Has Come!
(2021) GitHub's Automatic Coding Tool Rests on Untested Legal Ground
(Score: 2) by SomeRandomGeek on Friday January 06 2023, @06:01PM (1 child)
You need to think about it legally rather than technically. I would like to hear Microsoft's legal theory of the case. Do they think that an AI trained from data is not a derived work of that data? Do they think that their AI is based on so many different pieces of stolen code that attribution can't be traced to any one source and therefore they don't owe anyone anything? Did they hide a license to do this in the GitHub ToS? Do they think they have deeper pockets and they can wait out any challenge regardless of its validity? The details matter. Legal stuff is funny that way.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by sjames on Friday January 06 2023, @06:27PM
How about if an AI trained on publicly available source code is infringing copyright than so is literally every single human programmer who has ever lived except Lady Ada. Extending to other copyrightable works, it's copyright infringement all the way down.
And since that is literally the only known way of learning to write or code, we can either return to the caves (but NO DRAWING!) or decide perhaps this is not actually copyright violation.
As an amusing note, just imagine how many pat legal phrases have been ruthlessly copied without attribution in the court filing!