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Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#21

Post by mistrial9 »

jtchang wrote: post #15

This is a very clever move by Microsoft. In essence they are painting a giant bullseye on their back to any lawsuits that may arise. The idea being that they have the resources to challenge them (they aren't wrong). The way AI is going I'm sure we'll see some landmark cases very soon. It is very much in Microsoft's interest to grow this market as fast as possible and be at the center of it. This removes one of the ke…

prediction: use cloud deployments to fork critical GPL parts, restrict security updates that are required to their fork and implementation; control the rabble for a few years, issue press releases, and stall while they entrench it.

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#22

Post by layer8 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

One can only hope that this will work better than their software support.

I wonder how customers will have to prove that the contested code was actually output by Copilot.

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#23

Post by heavyset_go »

tyingq wrote: post #14

Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?

It's very telling that they train on millions of developers' code, but won't use their source.

If it won't violate IP rights, there shouldn't be a problem.

It suggests those whose code is trained upon have something to lose if the trained models are used by others.

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#25

Post by gjsman-1000 »

heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use.

Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there? ;)

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#26

Post by [deleted] »

stale2002 wrote: post #18
hulitu wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because now every copyright claim for GPL SW will hit the wall of Microsoft's lawyers.

People being able to get around copyright violations sounds like something that promotes the sharing of code not extinguishing it.

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#27

Post by [deleted] »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #25
heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use. Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the St…

[deleted]

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#28

Post by tick_tock_tick »

heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

Why would you need to launder? The output isn't under GPL to begin with. This is just so small teams can use it without having to deal with all the frivolous lawsuits.

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#29

Post by Scaevolus »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #25
heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use. Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the St…

11,000 lines of _declaring_ code-- the API signatures.

Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

#30

Post by eyelidlessness »

CameronNemo wrote: post #10
heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

I don't know why it is just GPL people talk about. MPL, Apache, MIT licenses all have additional terms beyond a basic public domain equivalent license. None of those terms are being respected.

Not OP and I don’t really comment on the topic much at all, but one reason I would expect more talk about GPL than those permissive licenses: I would also expect a greater likelihood of murky infringement cases becoming a legal matter. Just a hunch, possibly a very wrong one, mostly informed by how I’d evaluate choosing among these licenses.
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