Microsoft, GitHub and Openai appealed to the US court with a request to deviate a lawsuit that accuses them of violating Open Source licenses and requires compensation for $ 9 billion for Github Copilot. Lawyers Microsoft, GitHub and Openai argue that accusations of violations of licenses and compensation requirements are not founded.
Companies argue that there is no evidence of damage in the lawsuit and there is no justification for claims, including examples of violations of legal rights. Microsoft, GitHub and Openai argue that the plaintiffs rely only on “hypothetical events”, and Github Copilot did not personally harm them.
Companies lawyers claim that specific copyrights are not indicated in the lawsuit that GitHub Copilot violated by unauthorized use, or contracts and licenses violated when creating an artificial intelligence tool.
Microsoft states that the accusations of copyright violations are unfounded and contradict the doctrine of conscientious use, which allows the use of materials protected by copyright in certain situations. Microsoft and GitHub refer to the decision of the US Supreme Court of 2021, which confirms that the use of Google’s source code to create the Android operating system is conscientious use.
According to Microsoft and GitHub, Copilot does not delete anything from the public open source code, but only helps developers write code, offering options based on information that the tool received from public code.
IT companies through their lawyers in a response in court stated that the plaintiffs undermine the principles of open source code, demanding a court ban and compensation for billions for open software. The trial against Github Copilot is scheduled for May.
Recall, in early November 2022, Matthew Batterik, a legal programmer, sued California on Microsoft, GitHub and Openai year due to violation of Open Source licenses and infringing on programmers’ rights to the neural network assistant Github Copilot. The developer requires $ 9 billion as compensation from American companies.
GITHUB Copilot currently uses millions of lines of code from the public GITHUB repositories to generate code, and can convert a natural language into the code in dozens of programming languages. The neuro -assistant carrier performs this work automatically without analyzing and not taking into account the rules for licensing open source projects, such as GPL, Apache or MIT, which require indicating authorship and determining specific copyrights using code.