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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

#191

Post by StewardMcOy »

Are there any actual details on this? I get that this is a blog post, but the only links I see on the page are to other blog posts. It leaves a lot of questions.

Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? Is Microsoft specifically indemnifying all users of Copilot against claims of copyright infringement that arise from use of Copilot?

The blog post says that "there are important conditions to this program", and it lists a few, but are those conditions exhaustive, or are there more that the blog post doesn't cover? For example, is it only in specific countries, or does it apply to every legal system worldwide?

What guarantees do users have that Microsoft won't discontinue this program? If Microsoft gets kicked in the teeth repeatedly by courts ruling against them, and they realize that even they can't afford to pay out every time Copilot license-launders large chunks of copyrighted code, what means to users have to keep Microsoft to its promises?

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

#192

Post by satvikpendem »

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…

First, style is not copyrightable. I could draw something in a Studio Ghibli style and they could do nothing about it, legally speaking.

Second, the way we've seen generative AI be used is not really the same as it was touted originally, that a mere prompt could replace an entire artist's work. A year later, we see that most people, artists included, don't use it as a verbatim text to image machine, they use it as a tool. See apps like ComfyUI or others which allow Node based or layer based image creation and editing, which even Photoshop now has. It's the same as Copilot and ChatGPT, it's not replacing any programmers, just increasing their productivity Given that, it is not looking like generative AI is hurting one's professions, quite the opposite.

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

#193

Post by tick_tock_tick »

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…

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

That's true it's probably 99% plus it happening or at-least that's the conclusion that the experts and lawyers hired to help evaluate AI startup valuations are coming too. Hired by banks, venture funds, short selling shops, etc plenty of people who don't depending on it being ok to make money.

> "yes we're using copyrighted works, but we're doing it at scale and blending it, so that's ok"

I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok.

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

#195

Post by jacquesm »

542458 wrote: post #108
jacquesm wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will you indemnify those that follow your advice? Because 'transformative' is a pretty dangerous word to use in this context.

> Will you indemnify those that follow your advice? I strongly feel that this is a terrible metric for comments on the internet. First, the person you’re replying to has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by saying "yes". Second, it invites silly corner case nitpicking. Their comment is written in reasonable plain English for other users reading plain English. It’s not a legal contract, and so leaves lots of loopholes…

It's borderline legal advice and you have to be very careful with predicting how judges will rule on future cases.

In a legal context certain words have immense power. In the context of copyright 'transformative' is one such case. It's a very fine line between 'transformative' and 'derivative' and you don't get to preempt the judiciary about how they will see things.

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

#196

Post by dmix »

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…

> Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit

What are the odds the market leaders in LLM right now are just the current day version of Borland-style compilers before open source takes it over?

I've heard arguments the infrastructure part is a long term barrier to entry for OSS development, which will continue to remain in the future. But I don't know enough about it.

Who knows maybe the legal/gov world will move slow enough to miss the bulk of the money-extraction opportunities before OSS takes over and the reality of this problem never going away fully kicks in.

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

#197

Post by twoodfin »

satvikpendem wrote: post #116
smoldesu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Also, extracting for a new purpose is fair use of long standing, distinct from something like sampling for the same purpose of composing music.

Siskel and Ebert didn’t need to pay rights holders to extract from their works for public criticism.

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

#198

Post by dmix »

jtchang wrote: post #15

This is a very clever move by Microsoft. In essence they are painting a giant bullseye on their back to any lawsuits that may arise. The idea being that they have the resources to challenge them (they aren't wrong). The way AI is going I'm sure we'll see some landmark cases very soon. It is very much in Microsoft's interest to grow this market as fast as possible and be at the center of it. This removes one of the ke…

Or Microsoft just sees this as the less bad option. An acceptable tax, handing out some money extraction to white collar folks so the pressure on gov to cripple them doesn't come as fast.

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

#199

Post by lewhoo »

I'm just curious why is everyone talking about transformative nature and so little focus is given to:

4.the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (wiki)

I don't know if this particular case is good for exploring all angles of fair use, but to me this certainly is a greater hurdle for commercial generative ai.

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

#200

Post by bdowling »

paxys wrote: post #41
heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

Good. Screw companies trying to assert copyright over 10 line functions that reverse a string.

Those kind of functions are arguably not even eligible for copyright protection because they contain no human expression of the kind that is usually protectable (e.g., creative writings, artistic works).
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