A class action has been filed against Microsoft

On 3 November 2022, San Francisco attorneys Matthew Butterick, Joseph Saveri, Cadio Zirpoli and Travis Manfredi filed a class action in the United States federal court in San Francisco, California, on behalf of millions of GitHub users (an open-source website owned by Microsoft), against a group of defendants including GitHub, Microsoft (GitHub's owner) and OpenAI.

The plaintiffs allege that the artificial-intelligence product GitHub Copilot is unlawful. It was created using OpenAI Codex, an artificial-intelligence engine originating with Elon Musk and now controlled by Microsoft.

The plaintiffs further allege that, through their AI systems, the defendants infringed the rights of a vast number of software creators who published code or other work on GitHub under open-source licenses. The case concerns 11 popular open-source licenses that were allegedly violated, all requiring users to credit the author and copyright, including the MIT, GPL and Apache licenses.

The plaintiffs also allege that the defendants breached GitHub's terms of service and privacy policy, as well as other United States and California laws prohibiting copyright infringement, violations of consumer privacy rights and other conduct.

According to the plaintiffs, artificial intelligence should be fair and ethical for everyone. Otherwise, AI systems will not achieve their stated goal of improving human capability, but will serve destructive technological piracy, allowing giant corporations to profit from the work of many individual programmers who receive neither compensation nor credit. As far as is known, this is an innovative class action, the first of its kind in the United States, challenging the legality of AI systems' learning and training methods.

Further reading: https://githubcopilotinvestigation.com/

Clarification: the author does not represent plaintiffs in the above action.