Source: lawstreetmedia.com

Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI are facing a copyright class action lawsuit over the operation of Copilot, the artificial intelligence AI based program that suggests code and complete features in real time to developers using it.

The lawsuit alleges that Copilot violates the attribution requirements of various open source licenses, including the MIT, GPL, and Apache licenses. These, according to a document published by the plaintiffs, require the attribution of the author and the
definition of particular copyrights.

According to the opinion of experts in the field, the multiple publicly available codes are subject to the GPL license, which, allows derivative codes, however, these should be offered under the same conditions. In the case of Copilot, it is being used
to feed a commercial program that can generate code that is offered with other types of licenses.

In addition, the plaintiffs claim that Copilot is violating GitHub; own terms, the California Consumer Privacy Act, and other laws that give rise to similar claims in different parts of the world.

Due to this panorama, damages worth 9,000 million dollars have been estimated. This figure was calculated by the plaintiffs, who argue that each time Copilot provides an illegal product, it violates Section 1202 (of the DCMA) three times (distributing the licensed materials without attribution, copyright notice or license terms). So, if each user receives only one output that violates Section 1202 over the time they have used Copilot (up to fifteen months for early adopters), then GitHub and OpenAI have violated the DMCA 3,600,000 times. As legal minimum damages of $2,500 per violation, that translates to $9 billion.

This has certainly become a precedent, being the first class action case in the US challenging the training and performance of AI systems. However, there are still several issues to regulate the rules that will dictate the game of AI in terms of intellectual property.