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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

#121

Post by lewhoo »

smoldesu wrote: post #85
lewhoo wrote: post #71

Earlier 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…

Yeah. I wasn't so much trying to put weight on that you can get a fragment of copyrighted text, like Google Books also provides, but using the Bible as an example my point is you could technically get the whole thing bit by bit. You can't do that with Game of Thrones likely not because of capability but because of guardrails, because for a machine what's the difference if it's fed a copyrighted text or not.

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

#122

Post by andybak »

fsdavcaa wrote: post #11

With a big asterik-- "customers... must not attempt to generate infringing materials..." It hinges on what *Microsoft* decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. You'd like it to mean that it only excludes use when you're doing something you know would infringe copyright, like "reproduce the entire half life 2 source code." But who knows.

Ah. The comment that really should be at the top.

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

#123

Post by yladiz »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #119
CharlesW wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

What is at stake?

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

#124

Post by shortrounddev2 »

nico wrote: post #6
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you say that

It’s a reference to MS strategy: “"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...

I know the reference, why being it up here

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

#125

Post by kube-system »

simion314 wrote: post #109
satvikpendem wrote: post #47

It'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…

Copyrighted code with a GPL license is copyrighted code as far as copyright law is concerned. Copyright is the basis on which GPL is built. The GPL does not apply to anything that is fair use, public domain, or otherwise not copyrighted. If the author does not have copyright to the work in question, they don't have a right to license it.

This is all to say: the question about copyright and fair use remains exactly the same regardless of license.

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

#126

Post by beanjuiceII »

baz00 wrote: post #97
frognumber wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you be concrete? I would never want to be in a business partnership with Microsoft (as you are as a developer). I wouldn't want to be a competitor. I wouldn't want to be a lot of things. But as a customer? Can you name specific issues you've seen which impact corporate customers?

Mostly buggy shit that you pay for support on and they never fix. O365 weirdness and data loss. Worst was completely hosing 80 users’ machines with InTune bug. McDonalds price, McDonalds quality. But unlike McDonalds, long lasting and expensive problems.

seems not in tune with reality

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

#127

Post by IshKebab »

jacquesm wrote: post #95

A very relevant and recent posting: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html Previously on HN, in case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433

This misunderstanding of copyright is extremely common among programmers. He probably should have read this classic before writing so much:

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

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

#128

Post by jaysinn_420 »

yladiz wrote: post #123
CamperBob2 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

What is at stake?

Billions of dollars in investments that will partially benefit lawmakers?

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

#129

Post by [deleted] »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #105

It used to be "Embrace, extend, and extinguish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Now it is "Train, Task, Transform, and Transfer": Train - Feed copyrighted works into machine learning model or similar system Task - Machine learning model is tasked with an input prompt Transform - Machine learning model generates hybrid output derived from copyrighted works, but usually not directly tra…

[deleted]
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