“Your honor, we needed so many works that it was simply not practical to ask permission of the creators.”
The Copilot class action, Doe 1 v. GitHub, says GitHub and OpenAI built Copilot by stripping the attribution that open source licenses require. The complaint alleges DMCA violations for removing copyright notices and leaves out copyright infringement. Attribution is the only price most open licenses charge. The obvious defense is scale, which amounts to taking too much to pay.