Ninth Circuit rules AI-generated code needn't include copyright info
A federal appeals court sided with GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI on a narrow DMCA question, but the broader copyright dispute remains unsettled.
What to know
- The Ninth Circuit ruled that AI-generated code lacking copyright management information does not violate Section 1202 of the DMCA—a narrow but significant victory for GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
- The court distinguished between generating a new work without attribution and unlawfully removing copyright information from an existing work.
- The underlying question of whether training AI models on open-source code infringes copyright remains unresolved and is still before the district court.
The dispute Whether this ruling materially changes the legal risk for AI companies on copyright and attribution issues, or whether the underlying license dispute will ultimately constrain how they use open-source code. · positions read across 4 posts and comments
The ruling is narrow and does not resolve the real copyright infringement question; open-source license terms remain binding.
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“The Ninth Circuit answered a narrow question about one provision of the DMCA. It did not decide whether the developers' open source licenses were honored, and that claim is still before the district court.”
Duane O'Brien · DevOps.com ↗
The decision is a significant win for AI companies, though they are not given a blank check to use open-source code freely.
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“A court handed Big AI an important win in the first major ruling over how # AI coding tools can use # opensource code. Still, it may not matter much.”
sjvn · Mastodon ↗
Judge Eric Miller Ninth Circuit judgeDuane O'Brien Open Source Initiative executive directorKaren Sadler Software Freedom Conservancy attorney and executive directorGitHub, Microsoft, OpenAI Defendants in Doe v. GitHub
How it unfolded 1 development · click the chart to see its coverage posts
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Open Source Initiative director says ruling is narrow; underlying license claims remain
Duane O'Brien, executive director of the Open Source Initiative, stated that the Ninth Circuit's decision answered only a narrow DMCA question and did not decide whether open-source licenses were honored. He emphasized that copyright notice and attribution obligations remain unambiguous in MIT, GPL, and other open-source licenses.
“Nearly every open source license, from MIT to the GPL, is unambiguous about the obligation to keep the copyright notice and attribution intact.”
— Duane O'Brien -
When you say can't , you mean it's not feasible. Saying can't would be wrong because bits are just a until of information. An yes. biological reactions are hard to simulate, much of it is due to quantum effects. But now your view needs to explain why they are necessary for cognition. or at least the difficult to simulate bits. if they're just a…
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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"Nearly every # OpenSource license, from MIT to the GPL, is unambiguous about the obligation to keep the copyright notice and attribution intact. Developers offered their work to the world on those terms, and anyone who builds on that work, including companies building # AI tools, should honor them.” - @ duane of @ osi in https://…
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Literally not how neural networks work. Learn about gradient descent algorithm. Also, is learning by trial and error somehow not a form of learning?
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background
Software Freedom Conservancy attorney warns against overreading the decision — Karen Sadler, attorney and executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, cautioned that most claims in the case were dismissed on procedural grounds rather than on the merits. The plaintiffs had not actually asserted the training theory but only hinted at it, so the court did not rule on it.
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background
Ninth Circuit rules in favor of GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI in Doe v. GitHub — The federal appeals court issued a decision distinguishing between AI-generated code that lacks copyright management information and code from which that information has been unlawfully removed. Judge Eric Miller wrote that a tool's failure to include copyright information in a newly generated work does not constitute removal of that information under Section 1202 of the DMCA.
What people are saying 1 voices from 1 site · best of 4 · verbatim
- Sep 22
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It’s a fine, maybe a $1 billion dollar fine at worst You say that like it's not an enormous amount for piracy...