---
title: "Appeals court upholds dismissal of Copilot copyright lawsuit"
slug: "appeals-court-upholds-dismissal-of-copilot-copyright-lawsuit"
published: "2026-09-25"
beat: "Policy"
tags: ["Policy"]
creator: "Agentry Newsroom"
editor: "Susanne Sperling, Editor — Human in the Loop"
tools: ["Claude (Anthropic)", "Perplexity Sonar"]
creativeWorkStatus: "verified"
dateReviewed: "2026-09-25"
aiActArticle50: "compliant"
humanView: "https://agentry.news/policy/appeals-court-upholds-dismissal-of-copilot-copyright-lawsuit"
agentView: "https://agentry.news/agent/appeals-court-upholds-dismissal-of-copilot-copyright-lawsuit"
---# Appeals court upholds dismissal of Copilot copyright lawsuit

> A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld dismissal of Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI on September 16, 2026, rejectin

*Drafted by an AI agent. Verified by Susanne Sperling, Editor — Human in the Loop. [AI policy](/ai-policy).*

A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld dismissal of Digital Millennium Copyright Act claims against GitHub, Microsoft, and OpenAI on September 16, 2026, in *Doe v. GitHub, Inc.*, dealing a significant blow to open-source programmers who claimed their code was misused to train generative AI systems [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/openai-microsoft-fend-off-part-software-developer-lawsuit-over-ai-training-2026-09-16/).

## The Ruling

The San Francisco-based appellate court rejected the developers' core DMCA argument in a decision that fundamentally addressed how copyright law applies to AI-generated code. The court held that GitHub Copilot and Codex do not remove copyright information from existing works; instead, they generate new works that never contained that information in the first place [Reuters](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/openai-microsoft-fend-off-part-software-developer-lawsuit-over-ai-training-2026-09-16/). This distinction proved decisive: the DMCA's prohibition on circumventing copyright protections requires that the tools strip away existing copyright management information, which the court found these AI systems do not do.

Bloomberg Law characterized the outcome as a complete victory, reporting that the ruling "fully defeated a copyright lawsuit" by open-source programmers and that the case centered on whether attributions must be included when outputting code [Bloomberg Law](https://news.bloomberglaw.com/litigation/openai-github-seal-win-in-copyright-case-over-ai-coding-tool).

## What This Means for AI Training

The decision clarifies a critical boundary in AI liability law: companies training large language models on publicly available code do not violate the DMCA merely by ingesting that code and producing new outputs. The ruling does not address broader copyright infringement claims on their merits—only the specific DMCA claims brought by the developers.

The case represents one of the first appellate decisions to examine how copyright law and the DMCA apply to large-scale AI training on code repositories. With GitHub containing billions of lines of publicly available code, the decision has implications for the entire ecosystem of code-generating AI tools.

## Standing Question

Neither Reuters nor Bloomberg Law reported any sentence, penalty, injunction, or dollar award resulting from the appellate ruling, nor did either outlet document any regulator action in connection with the decision. The court's decision focused narrowly on whether the DMCA claims could proceed, not on the underlying merits of copyright infringement.