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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

#261

Post by Karellen »

dh2022 wrote: post #240
londons_explore wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think you should be looking at the best of the Microsoft/GitHub corpora to gauge their overall quality. You probably want to be looking at the quality of the median project, which is going to be heavily influenced by the long tail of low quality projects.

IMO, the long tail of non-code-reviewed, written-by-someone-in-their-first-month-of-coding, barely-even-compiles noob code[0] in Github is going to be orders of magnitude larger than the long tail of crap in Microsoft's internal repos.

[0] Hey, everyone has to start somewhere. There's nothing wrong with your first "hello world" program being buggy - that's what being a beginner means. But it's probably not the sort of code you want to train an LLM on.

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

#262

Post by gpderetta »

politician wrote: post #241
StewardMcOy wrote: post #191

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", a…

> Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? It can be. The concept is promissory estoppel. https://www.nolo.com/dictionary/promissory-estoppel-term.htm...

IANAL, but far as I understand, estoppel is purely a defense when being sued by whomever made the promise.

So it helps if MS sues you when you distribute copilot-generated code that infringes on MS copyrights, but if a third party sues you, you can't claim estoppel to compel MS to help you. You would need a contractual guarantee.

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

#263

Post by dietr1ch »

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.

Yup, individuals struggling to have impact will cut corners and heavily impact tech debt :P

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

#264

Post by soultrees »

Has anyone noticed that Copilot will shade out it’s answers more often when it’s writing code now? Usually I’ll paste in react components and ask it to fix the tailwind styling, but once it starts writing it gets filtered out by some secondary filter about half way through. I thought maybe the code it was outputting was too similar to copyrighted code and it triggered a liability filter of some sort.

In any case, super annoying to have that happen so consistently these days that I just use chatgpt to fix my tailwind styling now.

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

#265

Post by liliumregale »

eitally wrote: post #254
londons_explore wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Google absolutely has their own internal models that do exactly this. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft indeed does have an internal Copilot that is trained on their data, but even on the smallest risk that they leak their code, they wouldn't share that particular model.

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

#266

Post by giantg2 »

dh2022 wrote: post #258
giantg2 wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No, it really isn't when we're dealing with an organization that is audited for SOC 1/2, DoD, and likely others.

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

#267

Post by ryukoposting »

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.

The last thing the world needs is more code written in the style of Win32 API.

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

#268

Post by lijok »

Only so long as you have the guardrails enabled. One of the guardrails being that copilot will not output any code that exists in any github repo.

We tested copilot with those guardrails enabled and it completely lobotomizes it.

This by the way is not a change. They already had this “Microsoft will assume liability if you get sued” clause in Copilot Product Specific Terms: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

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

#269

Post by contravariant »

Eliah_Lakhin wrote: post #230
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.

Interestingly, would the Copilot become better after such training...

Negative examples should aid training, right?

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

#270

Post by throwuxiytayq »

soultrees wrote: post #264

Has anyone noticed that Copilot will shade out it’s answers more often when it’s writing code now? Usually I’ll paste in react components and ask it to fix the tailwind styling, but once it starts writing it gets filtered out by some secondary filter about half way through. I thought maybe the code it was outputting was too similar to copyrighted code and it triggered a liability filter of some sort. In any case, sup…

No difference on my side, but Copilot has always been reliably slow in my IDE of choice. Do you have the “allow public code” setting thingy enabled?
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