GitHub and OpenAI face allegations of negligence for their inadequate handling of personal data, leading to unauthorized access and exposure of sensitive info.

Learn about the plaintiffs' request for declaratory relief in Doe v. GitHub against all defendants.

Plaintiffs in Doe v. Github demand various forms of relief, including permanent injunctive relief, attorney's fees, statutory damages, and more

Plaintiffs provide no instance of such an assertion or implication, either as to works users place in public repositories or Copilot’s suggestions.

“The economic loss rule” dictates that “purely economic loss due to disappointed expectations” cannot be remedied in tort.

Plaintiffs’ fraud claim alleges merely that GitHub stated that it would not sell or distribute Plaintiffs’ code, then “failed to honor [these] representations”.

The Complaint also is not clear on whether or to what extent the training of Copilot forms the basis of the Plaintiffs’ claims for relief.

Plaintiffs allege Copilot’s suggestions will match snippets of existing code merely 1% of the time.

Even as Plaintiffs hypothesize harm from failing to be identified, they also allege their privacy is injured.

Plaintiffs claim that GitHub invaded their privacy at the same time that the overall thrust of the Complaint is a failure to publicly attribute their identity.

The DMCA was enacted to balance the rights of users with those of copyright owners in light of new technologies.

Plaintiffs duplicate their DMCA, tort, passing off, and privacy claims as purported violations by GitHub of California’s Unfair Competition Law.

Plaintiffs purport to advance an unjust enrichment claim against GitHub (Count VI), but “there is no cause of action in California for unjust enrichment.”

Plaintiffs’ breach of contract claim fails at the outset because the Complaint does not identify the contract(s) or provision(s) that each Defendant breached.

As Plaintiffs acknowledge, Copilot’s suggestions are not copied from any particular source, but generated based on patterns it has “seen the most."

Under California law, to state a claim for breach of contract a plaintiff must plead the contract.

GitHub’s TOS nor any of the common open source licenses prohibit either humans or computers from reading and learning from publicly available code.

The TOS informs users that “You own content you create, but you allow us certain rights to it.”

Plaintiffs purport to assert a claim under the Lanham Act for “reverse passing off.”

DOE v. Github (original complaint) Court Filing, retrieved on November 3, 2022 is part of HackerNoon’s Legal PDF Series.