9th Circuit upholds dismissal of DMCA claims against OpenAI and Microsoft in GitHub code-training suit

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a ruling that OpenAI and Microsoft cannot be held liable under the DMCA's copyright-management-information provision for training AI models on code from GitHub. Two anonymous plaintiffs, seeking to represent a class of open-source code owners, alleged that Codex and Microsoft Copilot reproduce their code without attribution, violating 17 U.S.C. § 1202, and also violated open-source licensing terms. District Judge Jon Tigar dismissed the DMCA claim but allowed the open-source license claims to proceed; the appeals court affirmed the DMCA dismissal. No ruling was made on the underlying copyright or license claims, which continue.