GitHub Copilot May Steer Microsoft Into a Copyright Lawsuit

upstart writes:

GitHub Copilot may steer Microsoft into a copyright lawsuit:

GitHub Copilot - a programming auto-suggestion tool trained from public source code on the internet - has been caught generating what appears to be copyrighted code, prompting an attorney to look into a possible copyright infringement claim.

On Monday, Matthew Butterick, a lawyer, designer, and developer, announced he is working with Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate the possibility of filing a copyright claim against GitHub. There are two potential lines of attack here: is GitHub improperly training Copilot on open source code, and is the tool improperly emitting other people's copyrighted work - pulled from the training data - to suggest code snippets to users?

Butterick has been critical of Copilot since its launch. In June he published a blog post arguing that "any code generated by Copilot may contain lurking license or IP violations," and thus should be avoided.

That same month, Denver Gingerich and Bradley Kuhn of the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) said their organization would stop using GitHub, largely as a result of Microsoft and GitHub releasing Copilot without addressing concerns about how the machine-learning model dealt with different open source licensing requirements.

Copilot's capacity to copy code verbatim, or nearly so, surfaced last week when Tim Davis, a professor of computer science and engineering at Texas A&M University, found that Copilot, when prompted, would reproduce his copyrighted sparse matrix transposition code.

Asked to comment, Davis said he would prefer to wait until he has heard back from GitHub and its parent Microsoft about his concerns.

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