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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

#351

Post by gmerc »

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…

You can make trademarked colors with microsoft paint…

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

#352

Post by gmerc »

yencabulator wrote: post #312
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…

> 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 ou…

Mickey (who will enter the public domain soon) is a specific expression and both copy righted and trademarked.

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

#353

Post by trgdr »

totallywrong wrote: post #335
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,…

> Code style of the whole world would be pushed towards 'Microsoft style' Yes, that's exactly what the world needs, more software like Teams.

I mean, microsoft's code is probably better than the github average. There's an awful lot of horrific code out there.

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

#354

Post by spott »

regularfry wrote: post #349
spott wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, though I’m not sure this risk isn’t overblown. I’ve heard of a couple cases where someone got a copyright statement spit out, but I haven’t been able to find much more than the one or two that I’ve seen on hn. If you have more examples, I’d love to hear about them. Code is also tricky: there are a finite number of ways to write an algorithm, and I’m sure both that multiple people have written the same version o…

https://twitter.com/DocSparse/status/1581461734665367554 is the one I was thinking of. It's not just the copyright header in that case.

Interesting, though I think I would put those examples under a “will emit copyrighted code if prompted to”. I can’t think of a compelling reason someone would prompt for a sparse matrix function with a “cs_” unless they were searching for copyrighted code they knew existed.

Though that is definitely a simpler prompt than I would have expected was necessary to get such a result. Thanks!

(The first example also isn’t the same code. It is very close, and definitely similar in style, but it isn’t clear that code would a)run, or b) would work as expected. I need to sleep though, so I’m not sure how much that matters.)

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

#355

Post by zare_st »

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.

Windows API and the entirety of its client code aren't a good source of standard C programming. On the source level you have additional types and qualifiers/annotations that only MSVC understands.

LLM copilot doesn't really understand the context of the project, it just goes for similar text.

So if you train on big projects you're picking up their patterns only. When a copilot user asks for a string concatenation 'tip' you want LLM to output a general answer, not something tied to a specific project. Big project is likely to use abstraction over strings, where base library usage is shrunk down to few lines of code as opposed to abstraction. In this case you'd want LLM to source a few "simpler" projects that use base library strings abundantly, so it can have decent amount of text for the most likely correct match over user's input.

I do believe Microsoft has all the code available for good training, it's not only about Azure, Windows and Office, there is tons more and it's open source already.

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

#356

Post by rcxdude »

tboyd47 wrote: post #60

What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?

Apart from the attempt to win over more cautious customers, most AI companies want this to go to court, because an established precedent in their favor will be very valuable to them (and they generally expect it will be in their favour, at least to the extent that the risk it might not is outweighed by the cost of uncertainty). You can see this in the cases related to stable diffusion where Stability AI is basically beckoning them into court despite (and probably in part because) the plaintiffs having so weak a case the judge is likely to just chuck it out before any precedent can be established.

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

#357

Post by croes »

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.

Do you think the prompt "sparse matrix transpose, cs_" is contrived?

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

#358

Post by Gigachad »

croes wrote: post #357
Gigachad wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do you think the prompt "sparse matrix transpose, cs_" is contrived?

Maybe? I have no idea what that prompt even means.

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

#359

Post by Retric »

spott wrote: post #322
Retric wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think this is basically the same as the sentiment that there is no such thing as a truly novel idea. The standard isn’t “I think that looks like an Andy Warhol picture”, it is “That is substantially similar to a specific Andy Warhol piece”. Copyright doesn’t protect style. > Feature extraction is literally a form of lossy compression. This is one way think of neural nets, another is that they find the topological s…

> it’s just a bunch of numbers and code

That really doesn’t fly legally because any digital format is ‘just’ numbers.

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

#360

Post by [deleted] »

zarzavat wrote: post #340
Retric wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Copyright is not cooties. For something to be infringing it has to be beyond the de minimis threshold. It’s not enough to show that a copyrighted work influenced another work, there needs to be some substantial level of copying. This music industry has been going through exactly this for the last few years and the courts have recognized that the creative process necessarily involves copying and that a small amount of…

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