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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

#141

Post by crazygringo »

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.

Nevertheless, there are standard opinions that get upvoted and get downvoted.

There is definitely a prevailing ethos here and it's valid to point out potential inconsistencies.

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

#142

Post by pseudosavant »

sublinear wrote: post #73
dbmikus wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may get you to the first working iteration faster, but it doesn't help ship code faster.

My personal experience has been that I most certainly do ship code faster when I use ChatGPT. It is so good at building out boilerplate, explaining and scaffolding new libraries/APIs I'm not familiar with, or telling me what I'm doing wrong.

I use GPT4 on the CLI via ShellGPT. Piping in `tail /var/log/nginx/error.log` and asking "What is going wrong here?" is amazing. I'll never use `man` to figure out how to use a CLI tool again either.

It is painful to watch people slowly do things at work (ChatGPT isn't allowed) that ChatGPT would do so much faster. We had to write up an incident report the other day. If we had just outlined everything that had happened in some rough bullet points, it would have written 95% of the final document. If we had gotten that done quicker, we'd have been back to shipping code to production quicker.

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

#143

Post by jcranmer »

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, due to its (generally) transformative nature.

Have you read the recent SCOTUS decision in Warhol v Goldsmith? Because that's a pretty major redefinition of transformative for the purposes of fair use, and not in a good way for arguing that generative AI is fair use, especially because it ties transformative to the market impact. That generative AI is generally creating outputs that are directly competing with inputs (particularly in the case of generating images, where it's clearly competing with stock images) would make it dramatically less likely that a court would find that it is in fact transformative.

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

#144

Post by aidenn0 »

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, due to its (generally) transformative nature

Purely mechanical modifications may not be considered transformative, and there's an argument to be made that LLMs are purely mechanical (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works).

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

#145

Post by crazygringo »

rurp wrote: post #84
fooker wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The variance is extremely high though. Only a small percent of users interact with any given story. Sometimes a posted story gets no traction, then sticks on the front page for many hours when reposted another day.

This is about up/down-voting comments, not upvoting stories.

There isn't really a lot of variance when it comes to the top voted comments on popular stories. Especially when it concerns the big tech companies. The opinions are fairly predictable.

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

#146

Post by littlestymaar »

I wonder how binding this kind of public commitment is. The same way Musk recently said publicly that he'll cover the cost of anyone having work or legal issues for something they said on the platform (and now refuses honor the engagement).

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

#147

Post by paxys »

tyingq wrote: post #134
paxys wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Closed source != source available. If you put your code out there in the world it is fair game for training, because you can't stop someone from reading and understanding it. Microsoft chooses not to make its proprietary code public, hence it is not available for training.

They have the ability to feed their closed source to Copilot for training without exposing the source to everyone directly, given the relationship. They choose not to.

They also have the ability to install malware on Windows and use everyone's source code for training, but choose not to, because private code is private. Their own code isn't an exception. Microsoft code in Github repos is used for training, just like the rest.

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

#148

Post by cma »

jacquesm wrote: post #89
mnd999 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also have money so they’re worth suing.

You wouldn't be suing Microsoft though. Microsoft would come to your aid if you are being sued for copyright infringement. That's a different situation altogether. So this is an indemnification for damages, not a protection against being sued.

In the most extreme case depending on how case law shakes out, the use of the models by a third party and distribution of the results will incur statutory damages for each work the model was trained on. This could bankrupt Microsoft for offering indemnification to even a tiny company, but as a response Microsoft could instead breach contract and not provide the indemnification. After the company goes bankrupt shareholders could only sue them for for the damages of not indemnifying you, limiting the liability to the size of the company that was sued into oblivion and not expanding out to unlimited liability for MS.

They probably have wording to prevent a mandatory injunction where you would compel the indemnification before the bankruptcy.

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

#149

Post by simion314 »

satvikpendem wrote: post #114
simion314 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

>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?

This never happens, you will first learn from a book or tutorials.

But your idea is sound, have Microsoft buy books from the authors and train the LLM on those books then have the LLM solve new problems. If is an AI and not a text interpolating tool then it should be able to learn like humans from a few books.

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

#150

Post by amalcon »

aidenn0 wrote: post #144
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, due to its (generally) transformative nature Purely mechanical modifications may not be considered transformative, and there's an argument to be made that LLMs are purely mechanical (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works).

> (in fact a US district court recently ruled that AIs cannot be authors of copyrighted works).

I thought that was because only humans and other legal persons can legally author things, not because of anything subtler about the nature of LLMs. See also the case where the monkey managed to take photos of itself. I'm not a lawyer, though.

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