Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI appeal to dismiss copyright lawsuit

Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI have teamed up to appeal for a dismissal of a lawsuit, that blames them for violating copyrights.

As reported by Reuters, the lawsuit alleges that the companies used copyrighted code to build GitHub's AI Copilot tool.

GitHub's Copilot is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) based code completion tool, that can understand and provide suggestions to finish code, and even let you adjust the suggested code to your liking.

GitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018, and the Redmond technology giant has a long-term, multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI.

As reported by The Verge, Microsoft, GitHub and OpenAI allege that the claims fail, "on two intrinsic defects: lack of injury and lack of an otherwise viable claim.” and OpenAI says that the plaintiff's, "allege a grab bag of claims that fail to plead violations of cognizable legal rights.”

The companies also say that the lawsuit relies on "hypothetical events" and has not caused any harm to copyrights.

In the filings seen by The Verge, Microsoft and GitHub make it clear that, "Copilot withdraws nothing from the body of open source code available to the public. Rather, Copilot helps developers write code by generating suggestions based on what it has learned from the entire body of knowledge gleaned from public code.”