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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

#251

Post by scj »

If a codebase was infringing the GPL, the remedy is to publish the offending source code or terminate distribution. Neither are cases I suspect Microsoft cares about when talking about 3rd party code.

I don't know what case history is like for damages with open source projects, but I suspect it wouldn't be that big of a concern for Microsoft.

Otherwise stated, Microsoft's downside to this is committing their lawyers. And the upside is to improve their code generation tools.

IANAL though.

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

#253

Post by belorn »

spott wrote: post #225
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're sugge…

Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts.

Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute patches.

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

#254

Post by eitally »

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,…

I don't know about MSFT, but I bet this would really help Google a ton. With a mono-repo and huge focus on readability, not to mention how many thousands of SWEs spend the majority of their time slinging protobufs around, it seems a significant fraction of day-to-day code could be largely automated.

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

#255

Post by regularfry »

akhosravian wrote: post #210
satvikpendem wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

While there are no IP protections for “style” there are certainly elements that are covered. Particular colors be trademarked, characters can be copyrighted separately from the works they appear in, design patents are a thing that cover more than most folks realize. I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be us…

> I don’t think any but the most copyleft segment of society thinks it would be reasonable for a generative AI trained on exactly one persons work to be used for profit by someone else.

Why do you think that? It doesn't seem obvious to me at all.

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

#256

Post by giantg2 »

blackhole wrote: post #249
giantg2 wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Without a myriad of dumbasses like me being able to commit to Microsoft vs Github, I'd assume Microsoft's average is better than Github's.

That is a... bold assumption to make. Not just for Microsoft but for any large corporation.

I'm not saying bad code doesn't exist there. My thought is that the percent of bad code increases with volume (or at least higher number of producers). Tens of millions of people committing to Github should mean its more cluttered with garbage than in MS. I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans. That's at least more than nothing.

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

#257

Post by regularfry »

spott wrote: post #225
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're sugge…

> Only if you ask it to.

This isn't necessarily true. It's entirely possible for a model to regurgitate a chunk of GPL'd code without you knowing that's what it's done.

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

#258

Post by dh2022 »

giantg2 wrote: post #256
blackhole wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a... bold assumption to make. Not just for Microsoft but for any large corporation.

I'm not saying bad code doesn't exist there. My thought is that the percent of bad code increases with volume (or at least higher number of producers). Tens of millions of people committing to Github should mean its more cluttered with garbage than in MS. I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans. That's at least more than nothing.

" I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans." -- that is a .... big assumption.

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

#259

Post by belorn »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #171
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The pirate bay case demonstrated that you don't need to prove a specific instance of infringement, only that occurrence of infringement "somewhere/somehow" was more believable than the alternative theory that no such infringement has happened. It may be enough to demonstrate that infringement is trivial, and then point to user statistics to demonstrate that infringement is more believable than that infringement has never happened.

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

#260

Post by jprete »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #193
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 cop…

You really think AI startups are valued based on the opinions of lawyers and experts? They’re valued based on whether the investors think they can find a bigger fool to hold the bag.
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