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📝 Page Status: Draft — sourced but not yet reviewed

  • Status: draft
  • Sources: 2
  • Relationships: 4
  • Research debt items: 4

Doe 1 v. GitHub, Inc.

Summary

Doe 1 v. GitHub, Inc., No. 4:22-cv-06823 (N.D. Cal.), is a class action by anonymous open-source developers against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI entities over GitHub Copilot. On June 24, 2024, Judge Jon S. Tigar dismissed the developers’ DMCA § 1202(b) copyright-management-information claims with prejudice, declined to dismiss breach-of-open-source-license claims, and dismissed unjust-enrichment and punitive-damages requests. Plaintiffs took an interlocutory appeal, Ninth Circuit No. 24-7700, which was argued February 11, 2026. No appellate opinion is recorded in the sources reviewed here.

Verified Facts

  • Defendants addressed in the June 24, 2024 order include GitHub, Inc., Microsoft, and OpenAI entities, including OpenAI Startup Fund I, L.P. and OpenAI Startup Fund Management, LLC.1
  • The court dismissed plaintiffs’ § 1202(b) claim with prejudice. It declined to dismiss the claim for breach of contract based on alleged open-source license violations against all defendants. It dismissed requests for monetary relief in the form of unjust enrichment and for punitive damages.1
  • Plaintiffs opened a Ninth Circuit appeal, No. 24-7700, from the Northern District of California case No. 4:22-cv-06823-JST. The appellate docket records case opening on December 23, 2024, and oral argument on February 11, 2026, in San Francisco.2

Historical Context

Doe is the leading U.S. case about generative coding tools trained on public repositories. It is not a conventional training-is-fair-use book or news case. The live district-court theory after the 2024 order is contract: whether Copilot’s use of licensed code breached the terms under which the code was published. The dismissed DMCA theory is about stripped attribution and license headers, a CMI issue that also appears in image and lyric cases such as Andersen and Concord.1

Jurisdiction: Northern District of California, with an interlocutory appeal in the Ninth Circuit. Authority level: district-court pleading order plus an appellate docket showing argument but not a decision.12

The software-freedom stakes are the license-compliance claim and the CMI identicality question on appeal. A ruling that § 1202(b) requires an identical copy would limit DMCA metadata claims against generative outputs that are similar rather than verbatim. The surviving contract claim, if later tried, would test whether public open-source licenses can constrain model training and output independently of copyright fair use. This page does not treat either theory as resolved.

Relationships

  • CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB cites SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-MTD-2024.
  • CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB related_to TOPIC-AI-COPYRIGHT.
  • CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB related_to CASE-ANDERSEN-V-STABILITY.
  • CASE-DOE-V-GITHUB related_to CASE-GOOGLE-V-ORACLE.

Sources

  1. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-MTD-2024: Order on motions to dismiss (June 24, 2024).
  2. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-9THCIR-DOCKET: Ninth Circuit docket No. 24-7700.

Research Debt

  • Add the original and operative complaints and the January 3, 2024 MTD order as pleading sources.
  • Add the September 27, 2024 order certifying interlocutory appeal and staying the district case from that PDF.
  • Add any Ninth Circuit opinion in No. 24-7700 when it issues.
  • Add Authors Alliance / Samuelson Clinic amicus briefs only if OIR needs the appellate-advocacy record.

Document metadata

  • Decision date: 2024-06-24
  • Last verified: 2026-09-02

  1. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-MTD-2024 — Order (June 24, 2024). Primary for surviving and dismissed claims. ↩↩↩↩

  2. SRC-DOE-V-GITHUB-9THCIR-DOCKET — Ninth Circuit docket No. 24-7700. Primary for appeal number, opening date, and argument date. ↩↩