Doe v. GitHub
A 2022 class action against GitHub, Microsoft and OpenAI alleging that Copilot reproduces open-source code stripped of its licence terms and attribution.
Programmer and lawyer Matthew Butterick brought the case with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm on behalf of anonymous developers. The core argument wasn't that training was unlawful as such, but that Copilot emits snippets without licence text or copyright notices — breaching the licences and the DMCA's ban on removing copyright management information.
Across 2023 and 2024 the court threw out most of the claims, the DMCA count included, because the plaintiffs hadn't shown the output to be identical copies. What mainly remained was breach of licence, and the identicality requirement went up for review on appeal. It became the first serious test of whether the conditions in MIT and GPL licences bite on a language model.