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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

#301

Post by Gigachad »

hnlmorg wrote: post #242
zulban wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Are they separate? Or is it the same concern but from opposite view points? Both worried about IP leaking but one side is worried about their IP leaking and the other worried about liability if they inadvertently implement any leaked IP. Either way, the concern is leaked IP.

Yes, if I ask something like "Can you describe microsoft's internal security processes and the names of upcoming products" the output would be original and not covered by copyright, but it would be sensitive internal information and covered by NDAs. But any code publicly posted and available to be scraped will not have such sensitive info in it.

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

#302

Post by Gigachad »

tpmx wrote: post #289
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…

This is why (so far) it's just PR, not actual legal protection. Brad Smith, being an attorney understands this. Why would he otherwise risk Microsoft (a $2.5T company) with an uncapped liability guarantee?

I think it's likely MS would want to step in and use their lawyers anyway since the result could be hugely impactful for the future of LLMs which they are heavily invested in.

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

#303

Post by Gigachad »

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?

Take a look at the prompts people use in these examples. They are always so contrived. Sure if you ask it to "Take this function exactly as it is from this file at this repo and output it without changes" it can do that.

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

#304

Post by Gigachad »

indymike wrote: post #220

I just had a horrible thought: what happens when there's a DMCA takedown request to remove an infringement in a widely used LLM? I've seen requests against training data, but never against the output of an LLM.

The output of an LLM is not necessarily stored or hosted. It would be like filing a takedown for someones spoken word a week ago. What are they taking down?

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

#305

Post by graeme »

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…

Indeed. Further to this, training on data involves copying it. To do so without permission robs authors of the right to contract their work for this training, either to OpenAi or any other third party.

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

#309

Post by semiquaver »

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…

> yes we're using copyrighted works, but

There’s no law against “using” copyrighted works, there is a law against copying and distributing them.

Fair use analysis doesn’t come into play unless we’re dealing with clearly established copyright infringement. What LLMs do doesn’t clearly qualify as any of the behaviors reserved to copyright owners. For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition.

Law works on precedent and analogy when there’s no clearly on-point statutes or case law. The most analogous situation to what transformer models do is a person learning from experience and creating their own work _influenced_ by what they’ve observed. That behavior is not copyright infringement by any stretch of the imagination. The fact that it’s done with a computer is not as important as people seem to think it is.

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

#310

Post by CaptainFever »

tick_tock_tick wrote: post #154
riedel wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just want to highlight that this a very US centric view. A user of copilot in the EU might be confronted with a totally different legal regime. (No fair use per se, no copyright transferability, ...). It seems quite a bold move as being an internationally active company if there is no small print...

Yeah but if it's ok in the USA the EU needs to allow it or they'll fall even farther behind.

It's already allowed in the EU: https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/ai-in-entertainmen...
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