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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

#161

Post by saurik »

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…

Google Books is transformative in its use and for what it is, sure; and yet, if you do a query on Google Books and try to take the output and paste it into your book, that might not be fair use (and I only say "might not" instead of "would not" as maybe you are writing a research paper and wanted a quote from a book or whatever, but of course that's just a silly corner case someone would try to call me out for on an Internet forum).

Just because Copilot might be itself a transformative work which is itself allowed to exist, that doesn't at all necessitate a conclusion that the developers who are using it are going to or should somehow be guaranteed not be committing their own copyright sins if they try to incorporate its output into their own works (any more so than one can or should assume all of the outputs of another human being are free of copyright entanglements, even though no one is as-yet claiming a human being is themselves infringement just because they saw another work).

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

#162

Post by professoretc »

amalcon wrote: post #150
aidenn0 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Correct, as usual, everyone interprets that case as 'OMG animals/AI created work is uncopyrightable!1!' but in reality it's just that animals/AIs cannot hold copyright. Whether a human using an AI can copyright the resulting work is still up in the air.

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

#163

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

jcranmer wrote: post #143
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 i…

I think the Warhol decision is an entirely different kettle of fish. Just take a look at the pieces in question: the Warhol portraits don't really look that different compared to the original photographs.

The benefit that generative AI has is that, when claiming copyright infringement, you need to specify individual works that were infringed. It's not enough to say "this work is an amalgam of these other ten thousand works, and we can't really tell you how."

I could imagine if generative AI gives an identical, word-for-word match for an individual piece of source material it could be in trouble, but that's also the easiest type of thing to prevent from an AI company perspective.

The fact is that existing copyright law just can't really encompass the kinds of societal concerns we have around generative AI.

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

#164

Post by whitfieldsdad »

pesfandiar wrote: post #155
whitfieldsdad wrote: post #139

I've received a lot of flak for this answer in other communities, but, if a statistical model is producing purely derivative works using a mathematical model that's basically a next best token predictor, is it really "stealing"? Is it "stealing" to have a working understanding of the next best token, or even simply the token that shows up the most often (e.g. on GitHub)? I'm sure that the argument could be made that…

The underlying mechanics are unimportant. You could make similar arguments about encryption and compression algorithms.

I don't follow, don't encryption and compression algorithms carry out a very specific steps that isn't likely to show up accidentally by happenstance?

(e.g. it'd be hard to accidentally invent Rijndael with nothing but next best token predictions, but might be possible to duplicate someone's code for inverting a binary tree or encrypting a file)

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

#165

Post by CameronNemo »

frognumber wrote: post #64
CameronNemo wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 i…

A warranty disclaimer is important, and there can certainly be damages argued.

Also important is attribution.

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

#166

Post by kube-system »

paxys wrote: post #147
tyingq wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why would MS need to worry about their private code being fed into their own private AI model?

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

#167

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

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

Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening.

Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit and did not take away from publishers or authors, to the contrary it helped people find their works.

Compare generative AI which extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. This potentially denies them the fruits of their labor. It's notable that it's a purely mechanical process and no human creativity is involved, except that which is extracted from other authors. Mere prompts don't count.

The argument you're suggesting will hold is essentially "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok".

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

#168

Post by nfriedly »

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…

I think it'll likely be deemed fair use because of how much money Microsoft and others are willing to throw at getting that result.

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

#169

Post by slashdev »

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…

Provided you don’t use it to deliberately recreate a substantial part of a copyrighted work. Intent will matter here, and it’s difficult to prove.

Even Microsoft is couching their guarantee here with an exception for this very case.

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

#170

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #163
jcranmer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 i…

I think the Warhol decision is an entirely different kettle of fish. Just take a look at the pieces in question: the Warhol portraits don't really look that different compared to the original photographs. The benefit that generative AI has is that, when claiming copyright infringement, you need to specify individual works that were infringed. It's not enough to say "this work is an amalgam of these other ten thousand…

No one has to claim individual copyright infringement for it to be copyright infringement.

At any rate you can force the infringer to disclose what works they use as input.

Copyright law doesn't encompass novel uses, but courts can and will deal with it.

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