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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

#61

Post by organsnyder »

hollerith wrote: post #33
gjsman-1000 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there? I always thought that code snippets that small are not considered by the Courts to be eligible for 'copyright protection'.

I always include a comment with the SO URL (though I haven't copied any code from SO in quite some time—it's not nearly as useful as it used to be).

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

#64

Post by frognumber »

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.

Yes... and no...

Courts -- under common law jurisdictions -- don't interpret contracts and licenses literally. If you stick within the spirit of a license or contract, you might be okay (even if you break the letter), and vice-versa.

Beyond that, it's a question of damages and consequences. Omitting a warranty disclaimer isn't likely to result in a lot of damages.

And finally, there are odds of getting sued. If you infringe on my AGPL code, I'll be pissed. I used that license for a reason. On the other hand, I /hope/ my MIT-licensed code is reused in commercial products. If you infringe on some term, I probably won't care.

There's a lot more nuance than that, starting with statutory law jurisdictions like France to things like statutory damages, and I'm intentionally oversimplifying.

However, from a 10,000 foot view infringing on the GPL versus on an MIT license are very different beasts, and there's good reason to be a lot more worried about the former.

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

#65

Post by fooker »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #57
naikrovek wrote: post #38

This is one of the things people on this site have been saying that Microsoft should do if they really stand behind Copilot, and now that they've done it, you have again moved the goalposts and this announcement is entirely insufficient. How dare they? amirite?

"people on this site" consists of thousands of people, including you, with a variety of opinions, and not everyone comments on every subject. You're basically complaining that not everyone believes the same thing.

While that's true, voted comments are a decent indicator of general opinions and trends.

There is a reason voting works (in this context, and otherwise), you can't always give up after declaring that people have differing opinions.

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

#66

Post by justrealist »

itsoktocry wrote: post #48
adverbly wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously it wouldn't be so straightforward. Microsoft would have access to your usage history, and would be able to easily prove your intended theft as a user if any of your prompts or usage history made it clear that you were attempting to subvert a license. If anything, this temporarily shifts the battleground out of the courts and into prompt engineering space. It would need to look like an accident for a bad act…

> would be able to easily prove Possible, perhaps. But what makes you think this is easily provable? Intent is hard at the best of times.

I would consider it on you to demonstrate that you can get Copilot to produce copyrighted content without obviously asking for it.

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

#68

Post by dbmikus »

sublinear wrote: post #59

Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get worse, not better. Copilot is such a flawed product from the start. It's not even a matter of its ability to write "good" code. The concept is just dumb. Code is necessarily consumed by people first before it's executed by a computer in a production environment.…

I use Copilot and it helps me out enough that I keep paying for it.

ChatGPT is also often faster than Google or Stackoverflow for when I'm working with unfamiliar APIs.

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

#69

Post by stale2002 »

backendanon wrote: post #40
stale2002 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The context is whether it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high. Conversely, if you write something that is copyright protected under the law, would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work and sharing it with the world without even attribution to you as the original author?

> it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high

So then it supports the sharing of code for anyone to use freely, which is the opposite of the "extinguish" strategy that microsoft did in the past.

> would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work

I think that copyright protections are way way to strong and I support making almost all of them useless and I support allowing people to side step copyright protections.

This is because I want more creative works to be freely useable by everyone. Especially for AI purposes, which is a highly transformative and powerful usecase.

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

#70

Post by singleshot_ »

mnd999 wrote: post #34
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…

They also have money so they’re worth suing.

They also have systemically gigantic amounts of money, so a court may be motivated to create favorable new law for them.
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