Microsoft—GitHub Copilot faced class-action lawsuit for training on billions of lines of open-source code without license compliance
In November 2022, developers filed a class-action lawsuit against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI alleging that GitHub Copilot was trained on billions of lines of publicly available code from GitHub repositories without complying with open-source license terms (GPL, MIT, etc.) requiring attribution and copyright notices. The suit sought over $9 billion in statutory damages. By May 2023, a judge dismissed 20 of 22 claims but allowed breach of contract and DMCA claims to proceed. GitHub's FAQ acknowledged that about 1% of suggestions may match training data.
Scoring Impact
| Topic | Direction | Relevance | Contribution |
|---|---|---|---|
| Intellectual Property Ethics | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Open Source Licensing Integrity | -against | primary | -1.00 |
| Overall incident score = | -0.885 | ||
Score = avg(topic contributions) × significance (high ×1.5) × confidence (0.59)
Evidence (1 signal)
Class-action lawsuit filed against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI over Copilot training on open-source code
Attorney Matthew Butterick and Joseph Saveri Law Firm filed a class-action lawsuit alleging GitHub Copilot was trained on billions of lines of open-source code without complying with license requirements (GPL, MIT, etc.) for attribution and copyright notices. The suit sought over $9 billion in statutory damages for DMCA violations. GitHub acknowledged about 1% of suggestions may match training data.