OpenAI, Microsoft said open-source code lawsuit lacks specificity

Microsoft Corp, Microsoft's GitHub Inc, and OpenAI Inc argued that a lawsuit against them for improperly monetizing open-source code in training artificial intelligence systems cannot be sustained for lack of specificity.

The companies said before a San Francisco federal court that the complaint by a group of anonymous copyright owners did not outline their allegations specifically enough.

Microsoft and OpenAI said the plaintiffs failed to raise what specific injuries they suffered from the companies' actions and that the lawsuit did not identify particular copyrighted works misused or contracts breached.

They added that GitHub's Copilot system, which suggests lines of code for programmers, made fair use of the source code.

A GitHub spokesperson for that the company has "been committed to innovating responsibly with Copilot from the start."

Two anonymous plaintiffs, who are seeking to represent a class of people who own copyrights to code on GitHub, insist that Copilot unlawfully reproduces their code.

.They said that the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source licensing terms.

Open-source software can be modified or distributed for free by any users who comply with a license, which normally requires attribution to the original creator, a notice of their copyright, and a copy of the license, according to the lawsuit.

According to the complainants, Copilot's goal of replacing a huge swath of open source by taking it and keeping it inside a GitHub-controlled paywall violates the licenses that open-source programmers chose and monetizes their code despite GitHub's pledge never to do so.

Microsoft also said in its filing that the copyright allegations would "run headlong into the doctrine of fair use," which allows the unlicensed use of copyrighted works in some situations.