Microsoft and its computer code-sharing website GitHub, as well as artificial intelligence firm OpenAI, are being sued in California. A proposed class-action lawsuit claims the firms’ AI-powered programming tool Copilot infringes copyright by using millions of lines of human-written code without proper attribution. It is the first big copyright lawsuit over AI and potential damages could exceed $9 billion.
“,” write the legal team bringing the suit in a statement. It is the first time such legal action has been taken against companies for their AI systems in the US.
Last year, OpenAI and GitHub released Copilot, a tool that helps programmers solve problems by suggesting and completing lines of code. The neural network was trained using millions of lines of computer code that people have uploaded to GitHub.
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The original code was placed in the repository under open-source licences stipulating that any reproduction must be attributed to the author. But Copilot, which costs $10 per month to use, produces its code free of any attribution, even though it is based on existing code, so it appears to be original work from the model.
“You really have Microsoft and GitHub and OpenAI working together to harvest all of this incredible open-source programming work that all these millions of programmers have done, and what are they doing? Not only are they privatising the profit, they’re selling it back to those same programmers,” says , a programmer and lawyer who is one of the representatives of the lawsuit.
The proceedings are a class-action lawsuit, which means that Butterick and lawyers at Joseph Saveri Law Firm, who are part of the team filing the suit, are potentially representing millions of programmers who had their code used in the model, if they join the class-action suit.
Butterick and his team claim that Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI have violated GitHub’s own terms of service and privacy policies, US copyright law and California privacy law, as well as violating the open-source licences. The team is saying statutory damages could exceed $9 billion.
“We can’t begin to speculate what Microsoft and GitHub are going to do, but the intended purpose of our lawsuit is that they act responsibly,” says at Joseph Saveri Law Firm. “They have the methods and the means to fix it, and it’s up to them whether they want to do it right now.”
Some legal commentators have argued that because Copilot is a machine, it .
Microsoft and OpenAI didn’t respond to requests to comment but it is expected they will robustly defend the claim. A GitHub spokesperson said: “We’ve been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start, and will continue to evolve the product to best serve developers across the globe.” In a recent blogpost, GitHub’s vice president of product Ryan Salva also wrote that .
“These companies need to be accountable for the systems that they put in the world,” says Butterick. “If they’re not going to be fair and ethical about it, well, we’re going to hold them to account – that’s what this case is about.”
