Ninth Circuit upholds OpenAI-Microsoft DMCA win

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on September 16 upheld a California judge's dismissal of Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims that OpenAI and Microsoft stripped copyright-management information when training Codex and GitHub Copilot on GitHub code. The court said the tools generate new works that never contained that information, rather than removing it from existing works, and declined to decide whether similar output could still support a traditional copyright-infringement claim. Contract claims that the companies violated open-source license terms remain live in Doe v. GitHub, No. 24-7700.