Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

blogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 398 posts

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

#231

Post by pyuser583 »

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…

Why is Google books so unusable then? Even documents in the early 20th century are inaccessible.

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

#232

Post by bdowling »

jiofj wrote: post #54
Scaevolus wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

11,000 lines of _declaring_ code-- the API signatures.

The API signatures were arguably the only thing that mattered.

The API signatures were arguably the only part that was copyrightable.

Code that is purely utilitarian (see “useful articles doctrine”) isn’t a work of human expression that is copyrightable.

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

#233

Post by denysvitali »

IshKebab wrote: post #127
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

Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read!

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

#234

Post by Kiro »

croes wrote: post #113
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…

Didn't Copilot produce an exact copy of code including the comments?

Only if you push it into a corner, at which point you may just as well go to the repo and copy-paste the code you're trying to reproduce.

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

#235

Post by rcme »

dragonwriter wrote: post #16
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.

> It hinges on what Microsoft decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. No, ultimately, it hinges on what a court enforcing the commitment believes “attempting to generate infringing materials” means. (OTOH. it also means Microsoft ha an even bigger incentive to use its lobbying power to assure that the law is such that liability rarely occurs with the use of these tools.)

The meaning is somewhere between your interpretation and the GPs. Even if a court would enforce Microsoft’s promise, you’d still need to sue Microsoft to compel action in the event of a disagreement and that would be expensive and you’re generally on the hook for your own legal costs when you sue.

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

#236

Post by zulban »

tremon wrote: post #194

Let Microsoft first publish a Copilot model that's trained on the internal codebases of Azure, Windows and Office. That's the only way Microsoft can convince me that they truly believe Copilot is non-infringing technology.

Leaking sensitive data and infringement are separate (tho related) concerns. They may not want to do what you say, even though it's totally infringement safe.

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

#237

Post by nonfamous »

professoretc wrote: post #162
amalcon wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (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.

In the monkey-photo case, didn't the journalist attempt to assert copyright on the photo the monkey took with his camera, but was denied?

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

#238

Post by londons_explore »

tremon wrote: post #194

Let Microsoft first publish a Copilot model that's trained on the internal codebases of Azure, Windows and Office. That's the only way Microsoft can convince me that they truly believe Copilot is non-infringing technology.

I suspect Microsoft would earn more money by doing this.

Their own engineers would get productivity boosts - with copilot already being familiar with data structures, code style, etc. would be a big boost to accuracy.

But also, third party code would end up being more similar. Code style of the whole world would be pushed towards 'Microsoft style', which probably makes hiring easier, less training time for engineers, etc.

And the downside, that is outsiders might learn tiny nuggets of info about microsoft sources, is probably irrelevant when outsiders can already decompile binaries and learn far more.

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

#239

Post by londons_explore »

nadermx wrote: post #227
tremon wrote: post #194

Let Microsoft first publish a Copilot model that's trained on the internal codebases of Azure, Windows and Office. That's the only way Microsoft can convince me that they truly believe Copilot is non-infringing technology.

Is there any evidence that it isn't also trained on parts of msfts code base?

If it is, it should be fairly easy to see.

We can already take a guess what many internal functions look like from the published symbol tables of every function across all major microsoft products. Simply ask copilot to write those functions and see if the code comes out better than a similar set of made up yet plausible function names.

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

#240

Post by dh2022 »

londons_explore wrote: post #238
tremon wrote: post #194

Let Microsoft first publish a Copilot model that's trained on the internal codebases of Azure, Windows and Office. That's the only way Microsoft can convince me that they truly believe Copilot is non-infringing technology.

I suspect Microsoft would earn more money by doing this. Their own engineers would get productivity boosts - with copilot already being familiar with data structures, code style, etc. would be a big boost to accuracy. But also, third party code would end up being more similar. Code style of the whole world would be pushed towards 'Microsoft style', which probably makes hiring easier, less training time for engineers,…

You are assuming Microsoft code base is superior to Linux / Git / MySql / whatever else is in github right now. That is a .... big assumption.

And if Microsoft's code ends up influencing the rest of the world code that would be a .... big downside.

Post reply on HN