GitHub Breached Their Duties: An Explanation

VIII. CLAIMS FOR RELIEF

COUNT 8 NEGLIGENCE Common Law (Against All Defendants)

282. Plaintiffs and the Class hereby repeat and incorporate by reference each preceding and succeeding paragraph as though fully set forth herein.

283. Defendants owed a duty of reasonable care toward Plaintiffs and the Class based upon Defendants’ relationship to them. This duty is based upon Defendants’ contractual obligations, custom and practice, right to control information in its possession, exercise of control over the information in its possession, authority to control the information in its possession, and the commission of affirmative acts that resulted in said harms and losses. Additionally, this duty is based on the requirements of California Civil Code section 1714 requiring all “persons,” including Defendants, to act in a reasonable manner toward others.

284. Defendants breached their duties by negligently, carelessly, and recklessly collecting, maintaining, and controlling their customers’ Licensed Materials and engineering, designing, maintaining, and controlling systems—including Codex and Copilot—which are trained on Plaintiffs’ and Class members’ Licensed Materials without their authorization.

285. Microsoft and GitHub owed its users a duty of care to safeguard and maintain Licensed Materials on its website and to prevent unauthorized use of the Licensed Materials.

286. Microsoft and GitHub also owed its user a duty of care not to itself use the Licensed Materials in a way that would foreseeably cause Plaintiffs and Class members injury, for instance, by using Licensed Materials to train Copilot.

287. OpenAI owed Plaintiffs and Class members a duty of care by using open-source code in violation of open-source licenses to train Codex and Copilot.

288. Defendants, through their unlawful acts described herein, breach of their duties proximately caused Plaintiffs and Class members injuries.

289. Plaintiffs and Class members’ injuries were foreseeable because Defendants are aware of the benefits of open-source licensing because they hold themselves out as advocates for open source, and serve as platforms to host open-source software.

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This court case 4:22-cv-06823-JST retrieved on August 26, 2023, from Storage Courtlistener is part of the public domain. The court-created documents are works of the federal government, and under copyright law, are automatically placed in the public domain and may be shared without legal restriction.