Ninth Circuit backs GitHub Copilot in copyright-tag case
The Ninth Circuit affirmed dismissal of a claim that GitHub’s Copilot coding assistant violated copyright law by stripping copyright management information (CMI) — the ownership and licensing tags attached to code — when it generated new code. The court agreed with the district court that producing a new AI output isn’t the same as removing tags from an existing copy, but rejected the lower court’s specific reasoning for reaching that result, calling its “identicality requirement” a misnomer and declining to endorse it. Per Chat GPT Is Eating the World, it’s the first federal circuit-court ruling on this DMCA question for AI outputs, decided in Doe 1 v. GitHub (No. 24-7700) on Sept. 16, 2026.
Why it matters: It's the first time a federal appeals court has ruled on this specific DMCA question for AI outputs, so district courts elsewhere now have circuit-level guidance on a claim other AI copyright plaintiffs have also raised.
The record: AI training & copyright litigation
Via Chat GPT Is Eating the World ↗
Posted to the wire September 16, 2026. Edited by Joe Balewski.