Ninth Circuit Clarifies DMCA Liability for AI-Generated Code, Dismissing Programmers' Claims
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals recently upheld the dismissal of claims brought by software programmers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The programmers alleged that GitHub Copilot and OpenAI’s Codex violated DMCA Section 1202(b) by reproducing their copyrighted code without including copyright management information (CMI), such as original authors or licensing terms. The court concluded that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the AI tools actively removed or altered CMI from existing works. Instead, the court found that the AI models generated new code that simply lacked CMI, rather than stripping it from pre-existing code. This decision distinguishes between claims concerning a model's inputs (removal of CMI before training) and its outputs (reproduction of material without CMI). The court also rejected the district court's prior ruling that challenged copies must be identical to the original works to sustain a DMCA claim, stating that min...
