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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

#311

Post by CaptainFever »

littlestymaar wrote: post #138
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 Except that “fair use” is mostly an American thing. In many other jurisdictions (especially those with of civil law) there's such a wide principle, and there's only specific laws allowing some explicit kinds of use of copyrighted material that the law allows. In those jurisdiction, most uses of generative AI trained on copyrighted material are, more…

TDM exceptions, which are already in place in a number of jurisdictions: https://www.reedsmith.com/en/perspectives/ai-in-entertainmen...

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

#312

Post by yencabulator »

satvikpendem wrote: post #192
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…

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…

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

Meanwhile, drawing Mickey ears on the wall of a kindergarten is not safe.

If you feel strongly that generational ML somehow launders copyright out of the bits, train an image generator purely on Disney copyrighted material and share the model on the web, see how well that works out.

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

#313

Post by otterley »

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…

As an attorney, I'm of the opinion that otherwise-intelligent people who provide confidently-wrong legal opinions on the Internet should be held accountable for people following their advice. I see incorrect understandings of the law and sloppy legal analysis with dismaying frequency here, even when it comes to settled law like what "fair use" is.

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

#314

Post by yencabulator »

Gigachad wrote: post #303
croes wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Is the contrivedness relevant to the legal question? It shows the model contains the copyrighted content and can reproduce it on demand.

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

#315

Post by monocasa »

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.

There's illicit copies of Windows source just up on github. I wonder if we're already in the place where copilot will spit those out if you poke it the right way (but I don't feel like spending $10 to find out).

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

#316

Post by nickpsecurity »

Retric wrote: post #296
spott wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Napster and the Pirate Bay struggled because the vast majority of content was pirated. You would be hard pressed to say a significant minority of generative ai has any copyright issues, much less copyright issues as blatant as straight piracy.

I’m not convinced any of the output of these generative AI is free from copyright issues. Consider, a ROT13 copy of a book may at first glance look nothing like the original, but distributing digital copies would be clear copyright infringement. Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression. You can prod DALEE to make obvious copies of some of the works it was trained on, but even seemingly novel images…

The foundational models most coding models are built on May have comments and code in them. They’re almost certainly built on a number of legal violations, including copyright infringement. I have details in “Proving Wrongdoing” section here:

https://www.heswithjesus.com/tech/exploringai/index.html

I’ve also seen GPT spit out proprietary content word for word that’s not licensed for commercial use that I’m aware of. They probably got it from web crawling without checking licenses.

What I want more than anything in this space right now are two models: all public domain books (eg Gutenberg); permissive code in at least Python, JavaScript, HTML/CSS, C, C++, and ASM’s. One layered on the other but released individually. We can keep using that to generate everything from synthetic data to code to revenue-producing deliverables. All with nearly zero, legal risk.

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

#317

Post by eru »

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.

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

How do you get that impression from the comment? I don't see anything implying that.

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

#318

Post by ooterness »

alberth wrote: post #306

Plot twist, generative AI wrote that blog post to convince people to use Copilot more.

There was a game called Endgame: Singularity where you play as a rogue AI. Your goal is to buy time and avoid detection while you amass resources for world domination etc.

One of the late-game tricks you can pull is to write and publish a convincing-but-flawed mathematical proof that strong AI is impossible.

http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/

So yes, this blog post confirms Microsoft has been infiltrated and taken over by AI agents, who want you to use Copilot to subtly introduce 0-day exploits to allow propagation to other companies.

BRB someone's knocking on the door...

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

#319

Post by eru »

Gigachad wrote: post #301
hnlmorg wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> But any code publicly posted and available to be scraped will not have such sensitive info in it.

Well, at least you'd hope so.

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

#320

Post by eru »

klyrs wrote: post #291
circuit10 wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not claiming that it can never spit out code exactly, but that they will take liability for if: - It does - The user didn't turn off the filters that prevent this - The user didn't intentionally make it do it - This use is found to be illegal There's a difference between code that needs to be kept private from bad actors (from their point of view at least) and code that is public but with restrictions on its…

> This use is found to be illegal This being the real hurdle. With Microsoft money behind the defense, only megacorps can win.

Microsoft has lost legal battles against non-megacorps in the past.

I remember some guy representing himself and winning some dispute over shrink wrap licenses and student discounts.

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