Programmer and designer Matthew Buterick filed a lawsuit against Microsoft in San Francisco on Thursday, November 3, saying the lawsuit was on behalf of the millions of GitHub users who could potentially be breached by the $10 per month Copilot service. The lawsuit aims to challenge the legality of GitHub Copilot and the OpenAI Codex on which the AI ​​tool is based, and GitHub was filed against owner Microsoft and OpenAI.

“By training AI systems in public GitHub repositories (although, based on their public testimony, perhaps much more), we argue that the defendants violated the legal rights of a large number of creators who posted code or other work under certain GitHub open source licenses – said Butteryk.

These licenses include 11 popular open source licenses, each of which requires an author name and copyright. These include the MIT License, the GNU Standard Public License, and the Apache License. The lawsuit alleges that Copilot violated and removed these licenses offered by thousands, possibly millions, of software developers, thus causing software piracy on an unprecedented scale.

Running entirely on Microsoft Azure, Copilot often reproduces code that can be traced back to open source repositories or licensees, according to the lawsuit. The code is never linked to the original authors, which is a license violation. GitHub’s lawsuit also accuses the Redmond-based company of monetizing open source developers’ code “despite GitHub’s promise to never do it”. Source