Developers suing GitHub Copilot have been dealt a major blow in court

A judge has dismissed nearly all of the claims a group of developers brought against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI in a copyright lawsuit filed in 2022. reported earlier by Register. IN court order In a case that was made public last week, a California judge left only two claims pending: one accusing the companies of violating open-source licenses and the other accusing them of breach of contract.

The original lawsuit filed 22 claims against the trio, accusing them of copyright infringement by allowing GitHub’s AI-powered coding assistant Copilot to coach developers. GitHub’s owner Microsoft uses OpenAI technology to power the tool. All three companies asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit in January, but Judge Jon Tigar denied their motion.

However, Judge Tigar’s latest ruling deals a blow to the accusation that GitHub Copilot violates the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by suggesting code without proper attribution. Although the court previously ruled that Copilot’s suggested code was not sufficiently close to its original source, the amended complaint disputes GitHub Duplicate Detection Filterwhich users can enable to “detect and block” Copilot suggestions that match public code found on GitHub.

The amended lawsuit claims that GitHub gives users the ability to “receive identical code” when the filter is turned off. cites a study shows how AI models can “remember” and recite parts of their training data, which could potentially contain copyrighted code.

That didn’t hold up in court, as Judge Tigar determined that the code GitHub allegedly copied from the developers wasn’t similar enough to their original work. He also cites part of a cited study that found that GitHub Copilot “rarely emits memorized code in benign situations.” Judge Tigar dismissed that claim with prejudice, meaning the developers can’t refile the claim. The court also dismissed the claims for punitive damages, as well as monetary damages in the form of unjust enrichment.

This does not mean the lawsuit is over. The lawsuit will likely continue over developers’ claims of breach of contract and open source license violations.