Last Thursday, interesting information appeared at updated judicial judic Irte Against Microsoft, Github and Openai about documented tendencies of the GITHUB COPILOT programming assistant to play a public code protected by copyright.
It is reported that the GITHUB specialists belonging to Microsoft deliberately set up Copilot so that the tool generates small changes to the code proposed by the developers, and that the output is not marked as a direct copy of the existing software.
In the lawsuit, originally filed back in November, on behalf of four unidentified plaintiffs, it is stated that Copilot, a tool for helping developers in writing a program code created according to the Codex model from Openai and commercialized Microsoft Github, studied on a public code, violating copyright law and requirements for licensing software, since the tool presented someone else’s code as its own.
The companies tried to get the termination of the case, but so far they only managed to refute some claims. The judge left the main problems with copyright and licensing and allowed the plaintiffs to re -file several claims with more detailed information.
The corrected lawsuit now covers eight points instead of twelve, maintaining accusations of violating the copyright law, violation of an open source license, dishonest enrichment and claims about unfair competition. In addition, several new charges are added instead of those that were sent for revision: the sale of licensed materials in violation of the GITHUB policy and deliberate intervention in the alleged economic relations.
The complaint also includes code samples written by the plaintiffs, which Copilot, presumably, reproduced literally. The judge, which supervises the case, allowed the plaintiffs to maintain anonymity in court statements due to reliable threats of violence against their lawyer, and therefore the plaintiffs licensed code was changed to complicate their identification. However, with a high degree of probability, the plaintiffs are still known to the defendants in this case.
The updated lawsuit also states that in July 2022, in response to public criticism Copilot, GitHub introduced a customizable user filter under the title of “proposals corresponding to the public code” to avoid viewing the software proposals duplicating the work of others people.