this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2024
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Programming

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Judge dismisses majority of GitHub Copilot copyright claims (www.developer-tech.com)
submitted 2 months ago by [email protected] to c/programming
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A judge has dismissed the majority of claims in a copyright lawsuit filed by developers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI.

The lawsuit was initiated by a group of developers in 2022 and originally made 22 claims against the companies, alleging copyright violations related to the AI-powered GitHub Copilot coding assistant.

Judge Jon Tigar’s ruling, unsealed last week, leaves only two claims standing: one accusing the companies of an open-source license violation and another alleging breach of contract. This decision marks a substantial setback for the developers who argued that GitHub Copilot, which uses OpenAI’s technology and is owned by Microsoft, unlawfully trained on their work.

...

Despite this significant ruling, the legal battle is not over. The remaining claims regarding breach of contract and open-source license violations are likely to continue through litigation.

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[–] [email protected] 105 points 2 months ago (5 children)

The judge also noted that the cited study itself mentions that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorised code in benign situations.”

"Rarely" is not zero. This looks like it's opening a loophole to copying open source code with strong copyleft licenses like the GPL:

  1. Find OSS code you want to copy
  2. Set up conditions for Copilot to reproduce code
  3. Copy code into your commercial product
  4. When sued, just claim Copilot generated the code

Depending on how good your lawyers are, 2 is optional. And bingo! All the OSS code you want without those pesky restrictive licenses.

In fact, I wonder if there's a way to automate step 2. Some way to analyze an OSS GitHub repo to generate inputs for Copilot that will then regurgitate that same repo.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 2 months ago

With an automated refactoring step to pretend it's really not derivative work despite being extremely derivative

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