On Wednesday, a panel of judges from the federal appeals court engaged in oral arguments concerning a lawsuit brought by programmers against GitHub Inc. and OpenAI Inc. The lawsuit alleges that these companies failed to provide adequate attribution when utilizing their AI tool, Copilot, to generate code.
This case, presented before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, focuses on the interpretation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). This legislation was designed to modernize copyright law in light of the internet’s evolution. Central to the discussion is how the DMCA applies to generative AI models that learn from copyrighted data, which includes both author attribution and copyright details.
The DMCA prohibits the removal …
