Judge Dismisses Lawsuit Over GitHub Copilot AI Coding Assistant

A US District Court judge in San Francisco has largely dismissed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI, which challenged the legality of using code samples to train GitHub Copilot. The judge ruled that the plaintiffs failed to establish a claim for restitution or unjust enrichment but allowed the claim for breach of open-source license violations to proceed. InfoWorld reports: The lawsuit, first filed in Nov. 2022, claimed that GitHub's training of the Copilot AI on public GitHub code repositories violated the rights of the 'vast number of creators' who posted code under open-source licenses on GitHub. The complaint (PDF) alleged that 'Copilot ignores, violates, and removes the Licenses offered by thousands -- possibly millions -- of software developers, thereby accomplishing software piracy on an unprecedented scale.'

In a decision first announced on June 24, but only unsealed and made public on July 5, California Northern District judge Jon S. Tigar wrote that 'In sum, plaintiff's claims do not support the remedy they seek. Plaintiffs have failed to establish, as a matter of law, that restitution for any unjust enrichment is available as a measure of plaintiffs' damages for their breach of contract claims.' Judge Tigar went on to state that 'court dismisses plaintiffs' section 1202(b) claim, this time with prejudice. The Court declines to dismiss plaintiffs' claim for breach of contract of open-source license violations against all defendants. Finally, the court dismisses plaintiffs' request for monetary relief in the form of unjust enrichment, as well as plaintiffs' request for punitive damages.'

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