Pinky promise. Where's the legal agreement? I'm sure there's a cap on their liability.
Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
111–120 of 398 posts
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see? Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues. If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business. For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included th…
You guys aren't really getting my question. Duh, of course Microsoft makes revenue when they have more Copilot customers. But taking on such a huge external liability for a $30 subscription product just doesn't make sense. Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue. Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses, and targeting Microsoft instead of random…
A million subscribers would barely make it noticeable in Microsoft's books. You don't count until you hit a billion in revenue there. But an AI on every desk ? That's worth it.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#113It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
Didn't Copilot produce an exact copy of code including the comments?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#114It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
>It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use What if you train it only on my huge repo of GPL code? You are just remixing my code. Now you maybe think "let me train on 2 different devs GPL code", the remixed code will probably be 50-50 and you can get away with it ? If the 2 number is too small then tell me what the number N should be ? From how many people you need to "steal" code , mix it and…
What if I learned to code based only on your huge repo of GPL code? I'd just be remixing your GPL code at that point, right? Will you brand all of my output as being GPL as well?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's pure speculation. Whatever the reasons are they currently don't and that's a tell.
seems likely to hurt the product's adoption if was trained on Microsoft's source code who would want the genius of Teams, sharepoint, onedrive or powerbi in their product?
The many large companies with equally crappy code who just care about cutting costs and have fallen for the "AI" fad?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing one I'd say it is possible to produce exact data as well. Try "Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25" with chatgpt. You'll get a verbatim text. You can get the same with things like Moby Dick, but when I typed "Provide the first five sentences of the book A Game Of Thrones" I got: Certainly! Here are the first fiv…
That's part of what made the Google Books ruling so shocking; it considered Google's transformation of "we digitized and indexed these books" to be transformative. If you punch the ASOIAF quote into it, Books will reproduce the text of Game of Thrones that had your query: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+b... It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively r…
It's likely defended due to being non-commericial and for the public good, as I posted with my link to the Harvard page above. That was for literal copying and pasting so the bar for transformativeness is higher, but with generative AI where it can produce wholly new code/images, I think it will also be deemed fair use.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#117It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
I just want to highlight that this a very US centric view. A user of copilot in the EU might be confronted with a totally different legal regime. (No fair use per se, no copyright transferability, ...). It seems quite a bold move as being an internationally active company if there is no small print...
Yes, I'm talking about American law specifically.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#118Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
Having seen some very secret and proprietary Microsoft code, you don't want to use it anyways. lol
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#119It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. This isn't how "fair use" works, in the sense that there can never be a blanket assurance like that. Also, whether the result is "transformative" is just one of many factors (see audio sampling/remixing).
It's not how fair use works now, but many things about copyright law will have to change radically over the next few years. There's too much at stake.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#120It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature. Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing ones, but the courts might see that generally speaking, it produces new content that has not been seen before, especially in the case of images. Google Books literally copied and pasted books to add to their online da…
>It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use What if you train it only on my huge repo of GPL code? You are just remixing my code. Now you maybe think "let me train on 2 different devs GPL code", the remixed code will probably be 50-50 and you can get away with it ? If the 2 number is too small then tell me what the number N should be ? From how many people you need to "steal" code , mix it and…
> What if you train it only one my huge repo of GPL code? You are just remixing my code.
The word "remixing" here is useful because it will fit any conclusion the reader prefers.
Arguably even in your reductive example, the result would be non-infringing. Or not. Which conclusion you reach is exactly the topic under debate. Isn't this textbook question begging?