Last week, we witnessed some interesting lawsuits filed in the U.S. federal courts in regard to Google’s advertising business unit and Microsoft, GitHub and Open AI fair use of open source code on GitHub.
Image by Sergei Tokmakov, Esq. https://Terms.Law from Pixabay
Google lawsuit
On Tuesday January 24, 2023, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Alphabet Inc. Google unit before federal court in Virginia, the United States, following the previous one filed three years ago. According to the Wall Street Journal, it alleges that Google abuses its role as one of the largest brokers, suppliers and online auctioneers of ads placed on websites and mobile applications. Google’s monopoly abuse allegedly hurts web publishers, advertisers trying to use competing products. This is the attempt of the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division to force Google to sell part of its advertising technology unit. According to Reuters, Google’s ad-tech business revenue in 2021 amounts to roughly 12% of the company’s total revenue. Thus, this unit maintains a significant role in the company’s overall sales.
Sources:
https://www.reuters.com/legal/google-faces-greater-threat-forced-ad-unit-sale-us-2023-01-27/
Microsoft Corp, Microsoft’s GitHub Inc and Open AI Inc lawsuit
On Thursday January 26, 2023, a group of anonymous copyright owners filed a class-action lawsuit for allegation of improperly monetising open-source code to train GitHub’s Copilot system before San Francisco Federal Court. The plaintiffs alleged that the companies trained Copilot with code from GitHub repositories non-compliant with open-source licensing terms, thus it illicitly reproduced their code.
However, the companies underlined that the complaint lacked the standing of (i) specific injuries the plaintiffs suffered from the companies’ actions, (ii) particular copyrighted works which the companies misused, or contracts that they breached. They also considered that their use of this code would fall into the scope of the fair use doctrine, as the previous case Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc. in 2021.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
Complaint: https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/legaldocs/xmvjklzrypr/MICROSOFT%20OPENAI%20%20openaimtd.pdf
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