Lawsuit Takes Aim at the Way A.I. Is Built

The lawsuit has echoes in the last few decades of the technology industry. In the 1990s and into the 2000s, Microsoft fought the rise of open source software, seeing it as an existential threat to the future of the company's business. As the importance of open source grew, Microsoft embraced it and even acquired GitHub, a home to open source programmers and a place where they built and stored their code. Nearly every new generation of technology -- even online search engines -- has faced similar legal challenges. Often, "there is no statute or case law that covers it," said Bradley J. Hulbert, an intellectual property lawyer who specializes in this increasingly important area of the law.