In a potential landmark case for the technology sector, GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI have been denied their attempt to dismiss a copyright lawsuit tied to the Copilot programming assistant.

The lawsuit pertains to the AI-powered coding tool called Copilot and its underlying model Codex. Tech giants Microsoft, OpenAI, and GitHub jointly developed the said tool. It utilizes machine learning to suggest code to developers as they type.

This feature has provoked serious legal ramifications. It’s trained on publicly available code, including many open-source projects, which leads to allegations that the software may infringe on developers’ copyright.

Software developers have claimed that Copilot and Codex have been sourced from their code. Not only that, the model sometimes reproduces them without any clear permission or concern from the developers. The judge has seemingly taken the plaintiff’s claim seriously.

He has further ordered to find out if Codex’s capacity to reproduce code truly represents any software licensing term breach. Furthermore, Tigar has dodged the giants’ trial to get over a claim under section 1202 (B). It’s the digital millennium copyright act that protects the author’s or owner’s rights.

However, Tigar dismissed the claims for violating section 1202 (A) of the digital millennium copyright act. The said act covers areas like fraud, unjust enrichment, breach of the privacy policy and terms of service, violation of the California consumer privacy act, negligence, interference, and unfair competition.

The U.S. Navy was found guilty of piracy and is ordered to pay a software company $154,400 for a lawsuit filed back in 2016. The company, Bitmanagement Software GmbH, filed a complaint against the Navy, accusing the military branch of copyright infringement.

GmbH claimed they had issued 38 copies of their 3D virtual reality software, BS Contact Geo, but while they were still in negotiations for additional licenses, the Navy installed the software onto at least 558,466 machines between 2013 and 2015.

In the court filing, GmbH claimed, “Without Bitmanagement’s advance knowledge or consent, the Navy installed BS Contact Go onto hundreds of thousands of computers. Bitmanagement did not license or otherwise authorize these uses of its software, and the Navy has never compensated Bitmanagement for these uses of Bitmanagement’s software.”

The company sued the Navy for nearly $600 million for “willful copyright infringement” of the software which, according to the vendor’s website, is a 3D viewer that “enables you to visualize and interact with state of the art 2D/3D content,” and is based on digital data captured from “various sources (land surveys, CAD, satellite imagery, airborne laser scanning, etc).”

The court filings stated that after GmbH filed the lawsuit in July 2016, the Navy uninstalled the BS Contact Geo software from all of its computers and “subsequently reinstalled the software on 34 seats, for inventory purposes.”

GmbH wrote in the court filing, “The government knew or should have known that it was required to obtain a license for copying Bitmanagement software onto each of the devices that had Bitmanagement software installed. The government nonetheless failed to obtain such licenses.”

However, the Navy responded in a separate court filing, claiming that the existing licenses it obtained allowed them to make additional copies of the software without requiring additional payment.

“Defendant denies that the licenses were limited to installation of BS Contact Geo on a total of 38 Navy personal computers,” the filing argued. “Defendant further avers that the Navy procured concurrent-use network-installation licenses of BS Contact Geo.”

The software company claimed the per-copy license was worth $1,067.76, but the Navy’s expert witness, David Kennedy, a Certified Public Accountant (CPA) for Pricewaterhouse Coopers determined that the price per license amounts to $200.

Kennedy’s testimony was found to be reliable, the court filing says, adding “Kennedy testified he looked ‘at the Navy’s side of the equation, and what they had agreed to previously, and what their use ultimately was of the software, and the limited amount of use.’”

The Court of Federal Claims determined that Kennedy’s conclusion was found “to be fair and reasonable,” and awarded GmbH $154,400.

Sydney-headquartered telecommunications engineering firm Serveno has been ordered to pay US software giant Autodesk $318,000. 

The Federal Court has ordered the company to pay Autodesk the sum due to copyright infringement of the latter’s AutoCAD software. 

According to the Business Software Alliance (BSA), Serveno allegedly made 20 unlicensed copies of AutoCAD. The damages also covered the alleged unauthorised downloading and use of educational versions of AutoCAD by Serveno’s employees. 

Autodesk’s CAD product is computer-aided design software that architects, engineers and construction professionals rely on to create precise 2D and 3D drawings. 

The $318,000 payment comprises $159,000 in ‘compensatory damages’ and $159,000 in ‘additional damages’ was calculated by reference to the three-year subscription price of AutoCAD. 

According to BSA, a global advocate of legal software use, the decision is another example of the application of the ‘licence fee test’ to calculate compensatory damages based on Autodesk’s suggested retail price for AutoCAD and the availability of significant additional damages for specific and general deterrence as well. 

Serveno was founded in 2011 and has offices in India and the US as well as its native Sydney. The company supplies information and communications engineering, telecommunications consulting and business solutions and has partnerships with the likes of Microsoft, Telstra Air and Motorola. 

ARN has contacted Serveno for comment. 

The BSA also revealed legal settlements worth a combined total of $65,500 for using unlicensed software, including AutoCAD, back in 2017. 

The settlements saw the four unnamed Australian businesses agree to pay damages obtained for the use of unlicensed software, according to BSA. 

A Victorian retail fit-out company agreed to pay a $35,000 settlement after it was found to be using unlicensed copies of Autodesk’s AutoCAD, while a Perth firm was fined $10,000 for the same breach.

Oracle is seeking more than $7m in damages from long-time software partner NEC Corporation of America (NECAM) – a subsidiary of tech Japan-based tech giant NEC Corp – over a complaint about copyright and breach of contract.

According to papers lodged yesterday with the US court in the Northern District of California, in December 2019 Oracle carried out an audit of NECAM’s use and distribution of its database software.

Although NECAM has been a member of the Oracle Partner Network (OPN) since 2004, the audit found issues related to “unreported royalties.”

A letter sent by Oracle in October 2020 called on NECAM to “resolve the compliance findings within 30 days.”

This was followed up with a letter from Oracle dated 19 January 2021, telling NECAM that due to its failure to resolve the audit findings, Oracle considered “NECAM to be in material breach of its agreements with Oracle.”

According to court documents, matters came to a head in March when Oracle sent another letter terminating NECAM’s OPN membership and its 2018 Master Distribution Agreement (MDA).

Now the dispute has been brought before a judge as Oracle seeks redress.

“Oracle has repeatedly asked NECAM to resolve the audit compliance findings, but NECAM has not done so. To date, NECAM has not paid the full license and support fees NECAM owes for its distributions of Oracle software,” Oracle alleged in its complaint.

It went on:

Microsoft are tightening their rules in Spain, where the company has started fighting those who use pirated versions of Windows. In the latest move, a woman from Madrid was sentenced to a total of 6 months in prison. According to the reports, the woman was using a pirated version of Windows OS on some of the devices in her establishment.

It is worth noting that the woman in question was not using the pirated version for her personal use. On the contrary, it was proven that the woman was using the pirated version of Microsoft Windows OS and Office on the computers used for her official needs.

The establishment, located in Madrid, offered international phone calls. More importantly, we need to consider that the crime was discovered way back in 2017. However, the legal procedure has continued for these years.

Even though she had appeared in court multiple times in the past years, the sentence was announced recently. In addition to spending six months in jail, the woman has to pay a fine of around $4,400, say reports.

On top of this, the court has asked the woman to pay Microsoft the price equivalent to the two licenses of Microsoft Windows. By all means, the verdict goes in tone with the methods taken to prevent the trends of copyright infringement and piracy.

Most importantly, though, it is the first time a person in Spain has been given jail time for software piracy. Even though the verdict was late, it would be a milestone for the tech giant in many senses. At least, the company can use the verdict as a reference for future pursuits.

It is unclear whether the company would target personal users who do not use Windows OS for commercial needs. Other companies tend to take legal action against the commercial applications of piracy while leaving the personal use scenarios.

Google has requested the US Supreme Court to overturn the Federal Circuit judgement which ruled that Google had infringed Oracle’s copyrights by using JAVA APIs in its Android OS.

The search giant warned that the entire concept of software APIs (application programming interface) would come under threat if the honourable Court rules in favour of Oracle in the decade-long legal battle covering Android and Java.

In its filing to the court on Monday [PDF], Google argued that it had done nothing unlawful by using some parts of Oracle’s Java APIs to help make Android OS communicate more easily with other programmes.

“We’re asking the Court to reaffirm the importance of the software interoperability that has allowed millions of developers to write millions of applications that work on billions of devices,” Kent Walker, Google’s chief legal officer, said in a blog post.

“An Oracle win would upend the way the technology industry has always approached the important issue of software interfaces.”

“It would for the first time grant copyright owners a monopoly power to stymie the creation of new implementations and applications,” Walker warned.

Google purchased Linux mobile OS start-up Android for about $50 million in 2005. At that time, the start-up was using Java’s class library APIs in its mobile OS. The first phone based on Android OS was launched by Google in 2008.

In 2010, Oracle sued the search giant over its unlicensed use of JAVA APIs in Android OS, saying it owed nearly $8.8 billion for Google’s use of the code.

However, Google rejected all those accusations, claiming that that its use of the software was covered by the American copyright doctrine of fair use. The company said it “reused only the material that was required by the Java language to perform the function of responding to the developers’ calls,” which was permissible under the “merger doctrine.”

In 2016, a jury ruled in favour of Google, stating that Google’s use of JAVA APIs was fair use. That decision, however, was overturned in 2018 by a federal appeals court.

According to Walker, the Supreme Court, in this case, will examine if copyrights can be extended to “nuts-and-bolts software interfaces, and if so, whether it can be fair to use those interfaces to create new technologies.”

Walker argues that a ruling in favour of Oracle would make it costlier and difficult for start-ups and developers to create more products for people to use.

The US Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in this case in March and a final ruling is expected by the end of June.