Interessante decisione dall’appello del 9° circuito, caso 24-7700, Doe c. Github, Microsoft etc., 16.09.2026 in tema di rimozione di informazioni presenti nelle opere dell’ngegno (software) depositate in regime open source in Github.
Alcuni programmatori hanno agito contro Github, Microsoft, OpenAI e altri perchè l’IA Copilot-Codex violerebbe il § 1202.b) del DMCA e cioè il divieto di rimuovere le “copyright management information (CMI)” (da noi non pare ci sia analoga azione civilistica, cioè ad hoc, verso la rimozione dei dati ex art. 102 quinques l. aut., più circoscritti rispetto a quelli elencati nel § 1202.c).1-8.)
La corte conferma il rigetto, dicendo che la norma, alla luce della definizione di CMI ex § 1202.c), richiede la riproduzione identica o quasi dell’opera dell’ingegno. Se invece questa è diversa, perchè come nei LLM è frutto di calcolo probabilistico di esattezza dell’output, la fattispecie astratta non ricorre.
<<Even so, plaintiffs’ own allegations about Copilot show that it is best understood as learning from existing works and then creating new works based on that learning process, not as making copies of existing works.
According to the complaint, Copilot relies on a “complex probabilistic process” to predict “the most likely solution to a given prompt,” based on “the solution it has found in the most projects” answering similar questions. Sometimes, plaintiffs allege, that output may match snippets of “code from the training data.” But their account of the algorithm’s internal process—inferring “statistical patterns governing the structure of code” and identifying the most likely completion—does not describe an action taken with respect to CMI attached to an existing work. Instead, it describes a process through which Copilot generates new works. In that respect, it differs from a traditional search engine, which, in response to a user’s query, retrieves and displays stored information—that is, copies of materials that already exist. If Copilot functioned like a search engine and produced outputs that were identical to plaintiffs’ code but did not contain CMI, then plaintiffs might have a stronger claim that Copilot had removed their CMI. But that is not what plaintiffs have alleged.
To be sure, Copilot’s output may in some cases be substantially similar to existing code. As the district court observed, Copilot may produce “a ‘modified format,’ ‘variation[],’ or the ‘functional[] equivalent’ of the licensed code” without the CMI. We express no view on whether that similarity would allow plaintiffs to assert a claim for copyright infringement. But we note that many copyright cases involve the creation of a work that is substantially similar to the plaintiff’s without attribution. See Yonay v. Paramount Pictures Corp., 163 F.4th 685, 692 (9th Cir. 2026) (“To show unlawful appropriation,” a plaintiff must show “that the works in question share ‘substantial similarity in protectable expression.’” (emphasis omitted) (quoting Skidmore as Tr. for Randy Craig Wolfe Tr. v. Led Zeppelin, 952 F.3d 1051, 1064 (9th Cir. 2020) (en banc))). If that were all it took to violate section 1202(b), the DMCA would supplant traditional copyright protections and subject defendants to potentially ruinous liability under the DMCA’s enhanced statutory damages. Compare 17 U.S.C. § 1203(c)(3) (permitting up to $25,000 per violation) with 17 U.S.C. § 504(c)(1) (capping traditional copyright statutory damages at $30,000 per work). We decline plaintiffs’ invitation to transform run-of-the-mill copyright-infringement claims into DMCA claims>>