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Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

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

#171

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #170
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

That's a little bit like "If a tree falls in the forest but nobody hears it..."

I mean, sure, "theoretically" any number of things can be infringement. But it's obviously a gray area, so it only really matters when somebody brings a suit and a work is found to be legally infringing.

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

#172

Post by r00fus »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #167
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 wor…

Ultimately I find that commoditization enables the purest form of the banality of evil.

Commoditized goods allows the bad to be sorted in with the good, allowing a price to be put on the commodity. Great where it's applicable but horrendous when it's improperly done - ie, home loans, or intellectual property.

If your commodity markets aren't properly regulated you get a race to the bottom. If you are trying to commoditize something that shouldn't be, it's effectively enables white-collar looting or money laundering.

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

#173

Post by tyingq »

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.

If they believe their own assertations, like:

- that it doesn't output training data verbatim

- the product is very transformative, only "learning" from training data

- There are no copyright infringements because of these two above

Well, then there's really no reason not to throw their own private code on the pile.

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

#174

Post by sillysaurusx »

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…

You're getting a lot of pushback, but the EU seems to agree with you: https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CC-St...

https://www.notion.so/DSM-Directive-Implementation-Tracker-3...

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj

The TDM4 copyright exception allows datasets to be created consisting of copyrighted works, as long as there is a mechanism for rightsholders to opt out. This seems like the best of both worlds: the dataset is transparent, rightsholders can assert their rights, and certain AI companies can train on copyrighted material.

Of course, this doesn't grant commercial rights for the trained model, only scientific and academic research rights. (I.e. it's fine for Meta to train and release a LLaMA model trained on books, as long as they're not commercially profiting from it, and there's a mechanism for authors to opt out.)

I'm talking with Jordan from https://spawning.ai to try to build some kind of opt out system that makes sense for books. One could imagine doing this for music too.

This is a European law, but unlike other overreaching EU regulations, this one seems like an extremely sensible compromise.

EDIT: Oh, Jordan emailed me a correction:

> Looking at your hackernews comment, my understanding is the right to opt out only comes for commercial research. So making a dataset for eleuther (or whomever you compiled it for originally) probably doesn't even require opt outs. It'd be if openai used it for gpt-5 and charged for it that it would be required.

Wow. So this law actually applies to commercial uses of ML, and non-commercial uses such as LLaMA wouldn't even require an opt-out.

That's wonderful. This gives researchers legal cover, and requires commercial uses to be transparent in their datasets.

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

#175

Post by tzs »

tyingq wrote: post #14

Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?

One possible reason is trade secrets in their source. There's generally more to source code than just what actually ends up in binary releases and that might contain such secrets.

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

#176

Post by bdowling »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #170
hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Until someone files a lawsuit and a judge and jury decide the infringement question, it’s all speculative.

Some cases are pretty obvious, but even literal copying isn’t always copyright infringement (e.g., if the material is arguably not eligible for copyright protection).

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

#177

Post by burnished »

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…

Not a lawyer.

But, no, it isn't stealing, but no one was talking about theft here - copyright violation is a separate concept. I think in part the less than cold welcome you are receiving is due to this subtle but fundamental difference

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

#179

Post by verve_rat »

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…

Sure, that might work for some places, but some jurisdictions don't have a legal concept of fair use.

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

#180

Post by dokein »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #167
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 wor…

I won't debate that no 'human' creativity is involved, but human brains are a purely mechanical process, and that's where human creativity originates (unless one invokes the supernatural).

LLMs are typically implemented in a way that makes them non-deterministic (i.e. temperature > 0).

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