Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXVII — The Future of OpenAI May Depend on the Fate of GitHub's Copilot in Court ($9 Billion in Damages)

Series parts:

  1. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
  2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
  3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
  4. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism... and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
  5. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub


  6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman's Departure (Effective Now)
  7. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
  8. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley's Long Career Serving Microsoft's Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub's GPL Violations Machine)
  9. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft's Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
  10. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)


  11. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
  12. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
  13. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
  14. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
  15. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation


  16. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
  17. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVII — Backsliding Into 1990s-Style Digital Slavery by Microsoft
  18. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVIII — The Story of NPM
  19. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIX — The Collapse of Team Mono
  20. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XX — Entering Phase II


  21. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXI — Rumours About How Microsoft Plans to Actually Make Money (Not Losses) From GitHub
  22. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXII — 'Mr. GitHub Copilot' Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley Pleads Guilty After Assaulting Women
  23. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIII — CoPlagiarist: Microsoft's GPL Violations and Plagiarism Tool Created by Serial Plagiarists
  24. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXIV — Using Microsoft Money as 'Get Out of Jail' Card After Suffocating Women
  25. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XXV — Microsoft Employs Serial Strangler as a Manager, Running GitHub Copilot in Spite of Arrest for Assault on Women
  26. there are lots of layoffs


  27. YOU ARE HERE ☞ The Future of OpenAI May Depend on the Fate of GitHub's Copilot in Court ($9 Billion in Damages)


GitHub: Where everything comes to die



Summary: Microsoft has poured billions of dollars into mindless, fact-free marketing of Plagiarism-as-a-Service; Copilot might be a crucial test case because there is now a class action lawsuit

WE still have literally thousands of lines in notes about Copilot and stuff related to the people behind it. Expect a lot of coverage to come. It seems like now is the perfect time to continue with that series, seeing there are lots of layoffs. The bubble is bursting; GitHub as a business isn't viable.

So what will Microsoft make of all the GitHub 'data'?

"There has been little coverage of Microsoft plagiarism of copyrighted code via their "OpenAI" scam Copilot," an associate recently said. "The DMCA, which they have abused extensively both directly and via their marketing arm the BSA, has provisions for severe penalties for their stripping of both licenses and attribution from the code they are plagiarizing."

Having focused on EPO and the openwashing pandemic (this has gone global and Sirius 'Open Source' is among the culprits) we've not had much time (also very limited human capacity) to cover the "OpenAI" scam. Now that the paid-for Microsoft hype has died down a bit, let's consider what's at stake.

"How much plagiarism can Microsoft get away with?""The stripping of licenses affects software patent coverage," the associated explained, "since some licences address software patents and some don't."

"Then there is the question of what kind of software patent scams "OpenAI" itself is trying to pull?"

Here is a recent explanation of where we stand now, as per the latest legal developments; ever since then it was only reported that Microsoft tried very hard to have this entire lawsuit tossed out, perhaps knowing that all the "OpenAI" modus operandi is at stake, with precedents counting. To quote the outline:

As projected here back in October, there is now a class action lawsuit, albeit in its earliest stages, against Microsoft over its blatant license violation through its use of the Microsoft GitHub Copilot tool. The software project, Copilot, strips copyright licensing and attribution from existing copyrighted code on an unprecedented scale. The class action lawsuit insists that machine learning algorithms, often marketed as "Artificial Intelligence", are not exempt from copyright law nor are the wielders of such tools.

The $9 billion in damages is arrived at through scale. When Microsoft Copilot rips code without attribution and strips the copyright license from it, it violates the DMCA three times. So if olny 1% of its 1.2M users receive such output, the licenses were breached 12k times with translates to 36k DMCA violations, at a very low-ball estimate.

"If each user receives just one Output that violates Section 1202 throughout their time using Copilot (up to fifteen months for the earliest adopters), then GitHub and OpenAI have violated the DMCA 3,600,000 times. At minimum statutory damages of $2500 per violation, that translates to $9,000,000,000," the litigants stated.

Besides open-source licenses and DMCA (€§ 1202, which for€­bids the removal of copy€­right-man€­age€­ment infor€­ma€­tion), the lawsuit alleges violation of GitHub's terms of ser€­vice and pri€­vacy poli€­cies, the Cal€­i€­for€­nia Con€­sumer Pri€­vacy Act (CCPA), and other laws.

The suit is on twelve (12) counts: – Violation of the DMCA. – Breach of contract. x2 – Tortuous interference. – Fraud. – False designation of origin. – Unjust enrichment. – Unfair competition. – Violation of privacy act. – Negligence. – Civil conspiracy. – Declaratory relief.

Furthermore, these actions are contrary to what GitHub stood for prior to its sale to Microsoft and indicate yet another step in ongoing attempts by Microsoft to undermine and sabotage Free and Open Source Software and the supporting communities.


This series about Copilot may seem small compared to all the media "garbage" (paid-for Microsoft hype that disguises or distracts from a Bing crisis, including many Bing layoffs). But irrespective of size/scale/reach, this is an important test case. How much plagiarism can Microsoft get away with? Plagiarism-as-a-Service isn't a legitimate business model (Copilot subscription for proprietary Visual Studio).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Topics We Lacked Time to Cover
Due to a Microsoft event (an annual malware fest for lobbying and marketing purposes) there was also a lot of Microsoft propaganda
EPO Education: Workers Resort to Legal Actions (Many Cases) Against the Administration
At the moment the casualties of EPO corruption include the EPO's own staff
 
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, November 22, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, November 22, 2024
Gemini Links 23/11/2024: 150 Day Streak in Duolingo and ICBMs
Links for the day
Links 22/11/2024: Dynamic Pricing Practice and Monopoly Abuses
Links for the day
Microsofters Try to Defund the Free Software Foundation (by Attacking Its Founder This Week) and They Tell People to Instead Give Money to Microsoft Front Groups
Microsoft people try to outspend their critics and harass them
[Meme] EPO for the Kids' Future (or Lack of It)
Patents can last two decades and grow with (or catch up with) the kids
Gemini Links 22/11/2024: ChromeOS, Search Engines, Regular Expressions
Links for the day
This Month is the 11th Month of This Year With Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (So Far It's Happening Every Month This Year, More Announced Hours Ago)
Now they even admit it
Links 22/11/2024: Software Patents Squashed, Russia Starts Using ICBMs
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, November 21, 2024
IRC logs for Thursday, November 21, 2024
Gemini Links 21/11/2024: Alphabetising 400 Books and Giving the Internet up
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: TikTok Fighting Bans, Bluesky Failing Users
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: SpaceX Repeatedly Failing (Taxpayers Fund Failure), Russian Disinformation Spreading
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Earned Two More Honorary Doctorates Last Month
Two more doctorate degrees
KillerStartups.com is an LLM Spam Site That Sometimes Covers 'Linux' (Spams the Term)
It only serves to distract from real articles
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 20, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 20, 2024