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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

#371

Post by heavyset_go »

dmix wrote: post #196
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…

> Google books was fair use because it was a public benefit What are the odds the market leaders in LLM right now are just the current day version of Borland-style compilers before open source takes it over? I've heard arguments the infrastructure part is a long term barrier to entry for OSS development, which will continue to remain in the future. But I don't know enough about it. Who knows maybe the legal/gov world…

You'd need millions of dollars to just compile and label datasets. The training itself requires a lot of resources and money, as does human reinforcement.

Open source models would need benefactors with deep pockets.

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

#372

Post by yencabulator »

livrem wrote: post #344
yencabulator wrote: post #312

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. 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…

Training purely on Disney's images would probably be difficult, considering the huge amount of images you need to train a model from scratch. But here is a "fine-tuned Stable Diffusion model trained on screenshots from a popular animation studio". Seems to have worked out quite well so far as that model was last updated last year. https://civitai.com/models/24/modern-disney

"Modern Disney" is neat, I wasn't aware of that. Just so you know, The Mouse is much more fierce about protecting their classic properties like Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck, so this doesn't quite demonstrate my point yet.

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

#373

Post by semiquaver »

heavyset_go wrote: post #370
semiquaver wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t your brain doing the same thing when it reads text or views a painting? Some people can even memorize and precisely recreate the things they’ve seen. But no one considers the process of lossy storage in human memory to be copyright infringement. Instead the later reproduction itself might be infringing. I think it will be the same here. Training models on copyrighted content won’t fall afoul of any existing law, instead legal challenges will have to be aimed at specific instances where the models produce output that arguably infringes copyright.

That’s inconvenient for opponents of this technology because they would prefer to ban the training itself, but there’s not a good justification under existing law to do this.

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

#374

Post by riedel »

tremon wrote: post #189
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...

no copyright transferability The economic part of copyright is transferable in the EU just as it is in the US, only certain moral rights (such as the right to attribution) are inalienable. edit to add: it's not just in the EU. According to Wikipedia, the same distinction is made in Brazil, China, India and Indonesia (among others, but those were a few big countries that stood out).

That is true: You are certainly allow to (exclusively) licence your works to others. Actually, I only meant it to be an example of how giving guarantees can become difficult if authorship is not clear.

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

#375

Post by indymike »

Gigachad wrote: post #304
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?

Whatever is generating the infringement.

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

#376

Post by hnlmorg »

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.

I don’t think GitHub Co-pilot can respond to prompts like that. I thought it was ostensibly sophisticated source code completion. If so, source code is absolutely covered under copyright.

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

#377

Post by spott »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #299
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.

> 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. Where generative AI ingests copyrighted works in order to work and bases its output on it, then it is copyright infringement, equivalent to 'straight piracy' of all that it ingested, unless it's deemed fair use. What Google does with its search engine, for exam…

Yes, but I believe there are two questions here:

* Does the model itself violate copyright? * Does the output of the model violate copyright?

I don't know how you could make an argument that the ingestion of information into a model through a training procedure in order to create something that can generate truly unique outputs isn't transformative of the original works. The legal standard for a new work to be considered a copyright violation of an original work is "substantial similarity". I don't know how you can make an argument that a generative model is "substantially similar" to thousands of original works...

Honestly, I'm not even sure if "fair use" comes into play for the model itself. In order for fair use to come into play, the model has to be deemed to be violating some copyright. Only once it is found to be violating does "fair use" come into play in order to figure out if it is illegal or not.

The second question is the one where fair use is likely to come into play more. And this question has to be asked of each output. The model's legality only becomes an issue here if, like Napster, you can't argue that the model has much point other than violating copyright. Napster didn't violate copyright (the code for Napster wasn't infringing on anything), but it enabled the violation of copyright and didn't have much point other than that.

I don't think you can make that argument though. I use ChatGPT most days, and I've never gotten copyrighted material out of it. I could ask it to write me some Disney fan fiction, which would violate a copyright. And I think there is a valid legal question here about who is responsible for preventing me from doing that. This is where I think the gray area is.

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

#378

Post by spott »

Retric wrote: post #359
spott wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, you are correct, I was being flippant.

But I think the greater point still stands. In order to call the model itself a copyright violation you would have to say it is "substantially similar" to thousands of original works. Then in order to make it illegal you would have to say it wasn't "transformative enough" to be considered fair use.

I can't come up with an argument for either one of those points that holds any water at all.

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

#379

Post by lindenksv1 »

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…

I am a lawyer and tried to find this new language but none of the legal documents I looked at appear to be updated to reflect any of this. Microsoft has a lot of different docs and it's a little confusing but the ones for Copilot are straightforward and none of those have changed any indemnity-related provisions since the spring.

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

#380

Post by CatWChainsaw »

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…

So many downthread comments pulling out the computers and brains are exactly the same meeeerrrrrr BS.

"I'll keep saying it every time this comes up. I LOVE being told by techbros that a human painstaking studying one thing at a time, and not memorizing verbatin but rather taking away the core concept, is exactly the same type of "learning" that a model does when it takes in millions of things at once and can spit out copyrighted code verbatim."

(I also love it when they're deliberately obtuse about it too. The past decade has made me sick of this trolling tactic.)

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