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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

#361

Post by Wowfunhappy »

Karellen wrote: post #261
dh2022 wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 order…

Now I'm wondering if the copilot AI (GPT3/4?) takes number of stars/forks/etc into account during the training process.

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

#362

Post by heavyset_go »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #25
heavyset_go wrote: post #8

You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.

This is the same website that rejoiced when Oracle v Google resulted in a Google victory, despite Google arguably doing similar. They did so with 11,000 lines of Oracle's code, but it was decided to be fair use. If that's the case... I don't think a regurgitation of 12 lines of GPL code by accident here and there will be a strong argument against fair use. Adding to that: How many people here actually abide by the St…

I'm not HN.

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

#363

Post by Retric »

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…

The de minimis threshold is shockingly low as seen in various successful lawsuits.

Critically it’s not just a question of what percentage of a work is a copy of the original but what of the original work was copied. IE copying 3 lines in a book is a tiny fraction of the book but if you coped half the poem it’s well past the de minimis threshold.

Similarly only a small percentage of a giant library of MP3’s comes from any one work, but that’s not relevant.

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

#364

Post by dndn1 »

dndn1 wrote: post #244
esafak wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can shoulder risks that other companies can't so they stand to capture more market share?

+1 Maybe they hope to kill new entrants for the enterprise market, including open source.

^ to elaborate on possible logic:

Training an LLM is a low barrier; legal guarantees is a high barrier.

This might turn out to be quite important; without backfiring it seems like a very smart move.

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

#365

Post by az226 »

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…

Copilot makes open source developers and contributors that much more productive which is a public good.

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

#367

Post by semiquaver »

diffeomorphism wrote: post #348
semiquaver wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 an…

> For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. What about pictures still containing watermarks? Regardless of the actual legality, this does not fit "certainly". > 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 No, it is not. It is called machine "learning"…

Here is the section of title 17 that defines the rights of copyright holders and what terms like “copy” mean in US law. It’s clear as mud but I feel it’s likely that the process of training neural network weights is not going to be held as equivalent to verbatim digital copies. It’s just not the same thing and the law has no clear provision for it, except by analogy to existing human creative processes.

https://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap1.html#106A

The most closely applicable existing law is that of “derivative works” but those require human authorship, so it’s far from clear that those would apply to AI output either. Ultimately this is going to be hashed out in the courts until some actual laws are written to deal with it.

(IANAL)

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

#368

Post by nickpsecurity »

spott wrote: post #325
nickpsecurity wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

The problem with this line of thinking is that a person can also cut and paste code that they don’t have a license to use… but until they do, they haven’t done anything wrong by reading the code. So either we carve out an explicit exception that machines aren’t allowed to do things that are remarkably similar to what humans do… which would be a massive setback for AI in the US. Or we agree that generative models are…

I agree with you. In fact, the latter is in my Alternative Models section.

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

#369

Post by dtagames »

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,…

This is incorrect and not how Copilot works. My company just hosted two MS engineers to explain it live to 175 of us.

The style applied by Copilot comes from your surrounding code context, not from the LLM. And that base, trained on all public repos from GitHub, knows everything about data structures, etc, in the languages that were scanned.

Nothing new would be gained by scanning MS's own repositories and nothing would be leaked or color the output in actual use.

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

#370

Post by heavyset_go »

semiquaver wrote: post #367
diffeomorphism wrote: post #348

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For example, it certainly doesn’t “copy” the things it’s trained on by any legal definition. What about pictures still containing watermarks? Regardless of the actual legality, this does not fit "certainly". > 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 No, it is not. It is called machine "learning"…

Here is the section of title 17 that defines the rights of copyright holders and what terms like “copy” mean in US law. It’s clear as mud but I feel it’s likely that the process of training neural network weights is not going to be held as equivalent to verbatim digital copies. It’s just not the same thing and the law has no clear provision for it, except by analogy to existing human creative processes. https://www.c…

> It’s clear as mud but I feel it’s likely that the process of training neural network weights is not going to be held as equivalent to verbatim digital copies.

It's taking verbatim digital copies and using a form of lossy compression to transform them, which I think is clear when looking at things like auto-encoders.

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