Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, January 29 (Reuters)-Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI want the court to reject a proposed class action lawsuit accusing the companies of scraping license codes to build GitHub's artificial intelligence-driven Copilot tools, Reuters reported earlier. In two documents filed in federal court in San Francisco on Thursday, GitHub and OpenAI, owned by Microsoft, said the claims outlined in the lawsuit were not valid.

Launched in 2021, Copilot uses OpenAI technology to generate and suggest lines of code directly in the programmer's code editor. The tool was trained based on GitHub's public code and soon after its release drew attention to whether it violated copyright law.

Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick, working with the legal team of the law firm Joseph Saveri, filed a class action lawsuit in November last year, alleging massive copyright infringement of the tool. Butterick and his legal team later filed a second proposed class action on behalf of two anonymous software developers on similar grounds, which Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI wanted to dismiss this time.

Microsoft and GitHub pointed out in the document that the lawsuit had two essential flaws: a lack of injury and a lack of other viable claims. OpenAI also stated that the plaintiff "failed to raise an infringement of identifiable legal rights". The companies argued that the plaintiffs relied on "hypothetical events" to make their claims and said they did not describe how they had been personally harmed by the tool.

"Copilot has not withdrawn anything from the open source available to the public," Microsoft and GitHub said in the document. "instead, Copilot helps developers write code and generate recommendations based on all the knowledge it collects from public code." Microsoft and GitHub also claimed that the plaintiffs "violated open source principles".

CTOnews.com has learned that a court hearing to dismiss the lawsuit will be held in May.

Microsoft has pledged billions of dollars to extend its long-term relationship with OpenAI. The company is also considering introducing artificial intelligence technology to Word, PowerPoint and Outlook, and is said to want to add artificial intelligence chat robot ChatGPT to Bing.

With other companies working on artificial intelligence, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI are not the only ones facing legal problems. Earlier this month, the law firms Butterick and Joseph Saveri filed a lawsuit, alleging that AI art tools created by MidJourney, Stability AI and DeviantArt violated copyright law by illegally scraping artists' works from the Internet. Getty Images also sued Stability AI, accusing the company's stable proliferation tool of "illegally" scraping images from the site.

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