Matthew Batterik (matthew Butterick ), developing open projects for printing. , and the legal company Joseph Saveri Law Firm, Initiated a href=”https://githubcopilotlition.com/”> trial ( pdf ) Against technology manufacturers used in the github copilot . Among the defendants in Microsoft, GitHub and companies that oversee the Openai project, which prepared the code generation model Openai Codex , which is based on Github copilot. During the trial, an attempt was made to attract the court to determine the degree of legality of creating services like GitHub Copilot, and clarifying whether such services violate other developers. Methods of machine learning and allowing you to benefit from the work of other people. The creation of Copilot is also considered as the introduction of a new mechanism for monetizing the work of open software, despite the fact that GitHub previously promised to never do this.
The position of the plaintiffs boils down to the fact that the result of code generation by a machine learning system, trained on publicly affordable starting texts, cannot be interpreted as fundamentally new and independent work, since it is a consequence of the processing of the existing code. According to the plaintiffs, Copilot only reproduces the code that has direct references to the existing code in open repositories, and such manipulations do not fall under the criteria of conscientious use. In other words, the synthesis of the code in GitHub Copilot is considered by plaintiffs as the creation of a derivative work from the existing code distributed under certain licenses and having specific authors.
In particular, when training the Copilot system, a code distributed under open licenses is used, in most cases requiring authorship notification ( PROTIRIBUTION