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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: 4, Interesting) by canopic jug on Friday January 06 2023, @06:47PM (2 children)
Among the other reasons, some of which are covered above, it is a nod to M$ Team99 and its successors which used their own custom web spiders to crawl forums and detect the use of the string "Microsoft", case-insensitive. IF you avoided that string, then you had a few hours or unimpaired dialog on whatever topic before they came along anyway. However, if someone was foolish enough to use the string naming the Beast of Redmond directly, then astroturfers and shills swooped in within minutes and filled the thread with trolling up to and including gay and or coprophillic porn text, whatever it took to drag the threads off topic -- including whining about the string "m$" too.
Their teams, whatever they are called now, are sneakier than ever and still doing what they can to disrupt use of FOSS and Open Standards or even discussion of either topic.\
If you're going to troll about the summary, why not pick on the typos or the bad math which looks to be off by three orders of magnitude?
Either way, you have some companies hiding behind algorithms which they set up and are using to strip both licensing information and author attribution, both of which are DMCA violations. Can we sic the Business Software Alliance after its master? Or will it not bite the hand that feeds it?
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2023, @05:10AM (1 child)
So anyone who uses "M$" is an incel.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday January 08 2023, @06:17AM
That was supposed to be sarcastic humor. Oh well. Whoosh it is.