GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI fight class action lawsuit with fair use

A group of anonymous developers recently filed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft (the parent company) and OpenAI (the technology provider), accusing GitHub’s AI programming assistant GitHub Copilot of engaging in large-scale software piracy. Copilot uses the public code base for training, and when developers write code, it automatically completes the follow-up code according to the context such as the function name. What Copilot supplements is likely to be a copy of the code snippet in the public code repository. These open source codes use different licenses, including MIT licence, GNU GPL and Apache licence, all of which require attribution and copyright. Copilot strips these requirements out of autofill, violating the copyrights of thousands, if not millions, of software developers. GitHub Copilot
It is a paid service, and Microsoft’s move is to monetize open source code. This week GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI said the plaintiffs lack standing to sue and that they cannot prove specific harm they suffered as a result of the companies’ actions. Microsoft still stated that this is fair use, and the principle of fair use allows the use of copyrighted works without permission in certain circumstances. The judgment used. The plaintiffs argue that the problem with Copilot is that it puts the original open source code inside a paywall through code autocompletion, which is unfair, not allowed, and improper.

This article is transferred from: https://www.solidot.org/story?sid=73977
This site is only for collection, and the copyright belongs to the original author.