What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?
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Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
201–210 of 398 posts
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
>It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use What if you train it only on my huge repo of GPL code? You are just remixing my code. Now you maybe think "let me train on 2 different devs GPL code", the remixed code will probably be 50-50 and you can get away with it ? If the 2 number is too small then tell me what the number N should be ? From how many people you need to "steal" code , mix it and…
Copyrighted code with a GPL license is copyrighted code as far as copyright law is concerned. Copyright is the basis on which GPL is built. The GPL does not apply to anything that is fair use, public domain, or otherwise not copyrighted. If the author does not have copyright to the work in question, they don't have a right to license it. This is all to say: the question about copyright and fair use remains exactly th…
you are assuming fair and impartial judgement that is then implemented
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you upload it to github, you give microsoft extra rights above the license you choose. I'm not sure they are bound by the license.
Those "extra rights" would need to be spelled out in the terms of service, and last I checked, they were basically just making sure GitHub had the legal right to host your code on the GitHub service. It did not include any provision to create and distribute derivative works outside the license included with the software being hosted.
I read
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
Chapter D4 gives microsoft the right to: parse it into a search index or otherwise analyze it on our servers
I don't know what a real court says, but I can imagine a lawyer saying training an AI is done by analyzing your code.
Chapter D5 gives almost anybody right to do a lot with your code, including creating derived works, as long as it happens on github. If the AI training happens on their servers, I think you agreed to them training an AI.
Not saying they are doing it right now based on that document. But I do assume a lawyer has enough material to make the waters really muddy, and a trial being decide by basically a dice roll.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#204Earlier 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…
> Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening. That's true it's probably 99% plus it happening or at-least that's the conclusion that the experts and lawyers hired to help evaluate AI startup valuations are coming too. Hired by banks, venture funds, short selling shops, etc plenty of people who don't depending on it being ok to make money. > "yes we're using cop…
> I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok.
Really? When has this been done?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see? Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues. If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business. For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included th…
You guys aren't really getting my question. Duh, of course Microsoft makes revenue when they have more Copilot customers. But taking on such a huge external liability for a $30 subscription product just doesn't make sense. Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue. Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses, and targeting Microsoft instead of random…
> But taking on such a huge external liability for a $30 subscription product just doesn't make sense.
Your confusion come from your mis-assessment of the actual risks. Microsoft engaged with tons of lawyers and legal experts and determined there is basically no risk at all taking this stance.
You think there is a very real risk that the AI output is copyright infringement while Microsoft's deep analysis says the opposite; that's the mismatch.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#206Another way to look at this is:
Microsoft just became a code copyright insurance company. The premium is paid for with individual copilot accounts for each developer. And the policy has its exceptions of course.
This is interesting.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#207Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Everybody seems to be saying this, but I really don't think there's even 50% chance of it happening. That's true it's probably 99% plus it happening or at-least that's the conclusion that the experts and lawyers hired to help evaluate AI startup valuations are coming too. Hired by banks, venture funds, short selling shops, etc plenty of people who don't depending on it being ok to make money. > "yes we're using cop…
> I mean you know collages are legal right? You literally take 100s of copyrighted pictures and put them together and suddenly it's perfectly legal and ok. Really? When has this been done?
You've never seen a collage?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see? Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues. If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business. For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included th…
You guys aren't really getting my question. Duh, of course Microsoft makes revenue when they have more Copilot customers. But taking on such a huge external liability for a $30 subscription product just doesn't make sense. Even if it gets 1 million subscribers, it would represent 0.1% of Microsoft's overall revenue. Software lawsuits can become multi-billion dollar expenses, and targeting Microsoft instead of random…
Many say that `expected revenue > expected expenses (including legal)` given the current regulatory framework, and maybe that's true and would explain this move.
If Copilot becomes more widespread, it might also force regulators to adopt more friendly regulations that would favor it, lowering the expected legal expenses. So this move by Microsoft might just be the bootstrapping they need to get this dynamic going.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#209What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?
>> What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see? Many businesses have not adopted Copilot because of potential legal issues. If any of the generated code / content is copyrighted, it could result in negative impacts to the business. For example, if Copilot generated code that is identical to code that it was trained on that was licensed under the GPL and a company included th…
Given your example of a company unwittingly adding GPL code to their proprietary code base, I have trouble seeing how Microsoft can offer to take liability for such an infringement.
The GPL requires that any software based off of it be GPL licensed and have public sources available. I can't imagine a situation where Microsoft pays a fine, and their customer gets to violate the GPL license by not removing the infringing code, or open-sourcing their product as GPL and providing sources to the public.
Enforcement of the GPL can't just involve paying a monetary settlement to get away with stealing open source code. It must involve the direct targeting of infringing software with demands that the software either take efforts to remove illegally borrowed code, or license the borrowed code as legally prescribed by the original license agreement.
That an AI got in the way of reading the license agreement should not be an excuse for doing zero due diligence in maintaining a lawful code base.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#210Earlier 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…
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 used for profit by someone else.
An AI trained on two or ten people’s work probably feels the same for most folks, but what about when it’s thousands or millions? What if instead of one persons work it is the works held in copyright by an entity like Getty Images?