by Programmer/designer Matthew Butterick, who announced last month’s investigation with law firm Joseph Saveri, formally filed a class-action lawsuit last week against Microsoft’s AI programming assistant GitHub Copilot, alleging it engaged in mass software piracy. Copilot uses the public code base for training, and automatically supplements the subsequent code according to the context such as function names when developers write code. Copilot supplements mostly copies of code snippets in the public codebase. These open source codes are licensed under different licenses, including the MIT licence, the GNU General Public Licence, and the Apache licence, which all require attribution and copyright. Copilot omits these requirements when autocomplementing, violating the copyrights of thousands, if not millions, of software developers. GitHub Copilot is a paid service, Microsoft’s move to monetize open source code. If it was trained on Microsoft’s own proprietary codebases, like MS Office and Windows, no one would dispute the act of charging for it.
https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/11/05/1257233/microsofts-github-copilot-sued-over-software-piracy-on-an-unprecedented-scale
