Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI want the court to dismiss a proposed class action complaint that accuses the companies of scraping licensed code to build GitHubâs AI-powered Copilot tool, as reported earlier by Reuters. In a pair of filings submitted to a San Francisco federal court on Thursday, the Microsoft-owned GitHub and OpenAI say the claims outlined in the suit donât hold up.
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 âsoftware piracy on an unprecedented scale.â 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.
As noted in the filing, Microsoft and GitHub say the complaint âfails on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim,â while OpenAI similarly says the plaintiffs âallege a grab bag of claims that fail to plead violations of cognizable legal rights.â The companies argue that the plaintiffs rely on âhypothetical eventsâ to make their claim, and say they donât describe how they were personally harmed by the tool.
âCopilot withdraws nothing from the body of open source code available to the public,â Microsoft and GitHub claim in the filing. âRather, Copilot helps developers write code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from the entire body of knowledge gleaned from public code.â
Additionally, Microsoft and GitHub go on to claim that the plaintiffs are the ones who âundermine open source principlesâ by asking for âan injunction and a multi-billion dollar windfallâ in relation to the âsoftware that they willingly share as open source.â
The court hearing to dismiss the suit will take place in May, and Joseph Saveri Law Firm didnât immediately respond to The Vergeâs request for comment.
With other companies looking into AI as well, Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI arenât the only ones facing legal issues. Earlier this month, Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed another lawsuit alleging the AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt violate copyright laws by illegally scraping artistsâ work from the internet. Getty Images is also suing Stability AI over claims the companyâs Stable Diffusion tool âunlawfullyâ scraped images from the site.