Claims by developers that GitHub Copilot illegally copied their code have largely been dismissed, leaving the engineers currently with only two charges remaining in their lawsuit against the code repository.
The copilot process just got more interesting
The class-action suit against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI was filed in America in November 2022, with the plaintiffs claiming that the Copilot coding assistant was trained in open source software on GitHub and as such would suggest snippets from these public projects to other programmers without concern for licenses – such as provide appropriate credit for the source – which violates the intellectual property rights of the original creators.
Microsoft owns GitHub and uses OpenAI's generative machine learning technology to power Copilot, which automatically completes source code for engineers as they type comments, feature definitions and other prompts.
Ergo, the plaintiffs are unhappy that, in their view, parts of their copyrighted open source code can be provided – rather copied – by Copilot for other programmers to use, without due credit being given and other requirements of the original licenses being respected.
