Microsoft in Court for Plagiarism and FOSS Licence Violations

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 30, 2023

• Microsoft, GitHub, OpenAI ask court to dismiss copyright lawsuit from anonymous plaintiffs

  Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI addressed a proposed class-action lawsuit filed by a group of anonymous copyright owners, who accused the companies of copyrighted source code misuse to power Copilot. The companies’ filings, submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, cite fair use and say that the lawsuit cannot be sustained as it “fails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim.”

• OpenAI, Microsoft want court to toss lawsuit accusing them of abusing open-source code

  "Copilot's goal is to replace a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall," the complaint said. "It violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so."

  Microsoft and OpenAI said Thursday that the plaintiffs lacked standing to bring the case because they failed to argue they suffered specific injuries from the companies' actions.

  The companies also said the lawsuit did not identify particular copyrighted works they misused or contracts that they breached.

• This lawsuit against Microsoft could change the future of AI

  For all the glitz and hype surrounding ChatGPT, what it’s doing now are essentially stunts — a way to get as much attention as possible. The future of AI isn’t in writing articles about Beyoncé in the style of Charles Dickens, or any of the other oddball things people use ChatGPT for. Instead, AI will be primarily a business tool, reaping billions of dollars for companies that use it for tasks like improving internet searches, writing software code, discovering and fixing inefficiencies in a company’s business, and extracting useful, actionable information from massive amounts of data.

• Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI ask court to throw out AI copyright lawsuit

  Things came to a head when programmer and lawyer, Matthew Butterick, teamed up with the legal team at Joseph Saveri Law Firm to file a proposed class action lawsuit last November, alleging the tool relies on “software piracy on an unprecedented scale.” Butterick and his legal team later filed a second proposed class action lawsuit on the behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which is the suit Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want dismissed.