Good news, everyone:

Quote:Today, we’ve filed a class-action law­suit in US fed­eral court in San Fran­cisco, CA on behalf of a pro­posed class of pos­si­bly mil­lions of GitHub users. (...) By train­ing their AI sys­tems on pub­lic GitHub repos­i­to­ries (though based on their pub­lic state­ments, pos­si­bly much more) we con­tend that the defen­dants have vio­lated the legal rights of a vast num­ber of cre­ators who posted code or other work under cer­tain open-source licenses on GitHub.

Yeah!

Expanding jkl's quotation to highlight the crux of the complaint (emphasis added):

Quote: (...) Which licenses? A set of 11 pop­u­lar open-source licenses that all require attri­bu­tion of the author’s name and copy­right, includ­ing the MIT license, the GPL, and the Apache license. (These are enu­mer­ated in the appen­dix to the com­plaint.)

This is indeed good news. Many open-source authors have freely shared their code, asking nothing in return but recognition of their authorship. To deny them even that is despicable.

It will also be an interesting case considering the future of "Fair Use" which doesn't exist in wide parts of the world, but Microsoft GitHub's lawyers claim that (e.g.) my code on GitHub is freely accessible as long as it is only "remixed", or something.

Looking forward to them losing.