Ninth Circuit Rejects DMCA Section 1202 Claim Against AI Models, Limiting New Copyright Liability
Updated
Updated · EFF · Sep 16
Ninth Circuit Rejects DMCA Section 1202 Claim Against AI Models, Limiting New Copyright Liability
1 articles · Updated · EFF · Sep 16
Summary
A Ninth Circuit ruling said code generated by OpenAI and Microsoft models does not violate DMCA Section 1202 merely because it lacks copyright management information.
Section 1202 bars intentional removal of copyright notices or author names from an existing work; the court drew a line between stripping CMI and creating a new output that never contained it.
The case came from anonymous GitHub contributors who alleged the companies trained on GitHub code and produced similar code without attribution.
Copyright infringement claims remain available if a model reproduces protected code, and the plaintiffs’ contract claims against the AI companies are still pending.
The decision narrows one avenue for suing AI developers while signaling that courts should not expand copyright remedies beyond rights Congress explicitly authorized.
Could this landmark ruling inadvertently give AI companies a legal loophole to launder copyrighted software without crediting the original human creators?
If stripping attribution from AI-generated code isn't a DMCA violation, how can independent developers protect their open-source licenses from tech giants?
Since pure AI output lacks copyright protection, who truly owns the commercial rights to software built entirely by algorithms?