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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

#271

Post by ryukoposting »

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…

There are cases where generative AI can be trained for the explicit purpose of ripping off a particular artist's style. Take a gander at all the artist/art style LoRAs for Stable Diffusion. Some of them are harmless (a Rembrandt LoRA for example) but others are trained to make convincing knockoffs of living artists who are trying to put food on the table.

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

#272

Post by zik »

giantg2 wrote: post #248
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.

Without a myriad of dumbasses like me being able to commit to Microsoft vs Github, I'd assume Microsoft's average is better than Github's.

I have a friend who worked at Microsoft... if his opinion is anything to go by that's very far from true.

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

#273

Post by burnished »

whitfieldsdad wrote: post #188
burnished wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a lawyer. But, no, it isn't stealing, but no one was talking about theft here - copyright violation is a separate concept. I think in part the less than cold welcome you are receiving is due to this subtle but fundamental difference

Ah, gotcha - I assumed that if some document said you couldn't use something for some purpose and you decided to use it anyway it would be considered theft from the intellectual property owner.

No, but there have been dedicated advertisement campaigns to convince you that they are the same thing. Theft specifically involves depriving some one else of their belongings, which is why the issue under discussion is copyright.

The way it works is more like when you create an original work you also possess the sole right to copy that work. I believe (80% confidence) that an independently derived work does not violate copyright, obviously easier to make a convincing case for instances like code or song lyrics where you genuinely expect the implementations to shake out the same from genuinely independent parties.

Sidenote, the document that says you cant copy something is the law. The documents I think you are referencing are licenses - the terms under which you are allowed to copy a work. The distinction I'm trying to make is that they can't extra forbid you, they just withhold their permission (as expressed in the license). Its not a super important distinction but I read up on it and felt compelled to share.

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

#274

Post by dataflow »

Wouldn't you have to first prove that your content came from Microsoft services? Hopefully you track & certify the provenance of every line of code and content you paste? Microsoft surely won't just take your word for it that your content came from them, so how would this play out in practice, exactly?

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

#275

Post by clankyclanker »

giantg2 wrote: post #266
dh2022 wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

" I at least assume MS has some automated code standard or security scans." -- that is a .... big assumption.

No, it really isn't when we're dealing with an organization that is audited for SOC 1/2, DoD, and likely others.

Are you sure?

https://arstechnica.com/security/2023/09/hack-of-a-microsoft...

The Azure-State-Department breach had nearly a half dozen contributing bugs...

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

#276

Post by spott »

belorn wrote: post #253
spott wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're sugge…

Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts. Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute pat…

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.

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

#277

Post by satvikpendem »

belorn wrote: post #253
spott wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're sugge…

Both Napster and the Pirate Bay founders argued that only users could be held responsible, since it was the user who requested the infringing files. It did not stop the courts. Anyone could use those tools to download creative common files and linux ISO, but those arguments did not succeed in the legal system. Bittorent as a technology was however not made illegal, as could be seen in games using it to distribute pat…

Those tools overwhelmingly supported pirate means, nearly no one was downloading actually legal public domain songs or Linux ISOs from there. I contrast with LLMs and generative AI, people are using them for actual work, not for piracy, which will be seen differently by the courts.

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

#278

Post by versteegen »

liliumregale wrote: post #265
eitally wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about MSFT, but I bet this would really help Google a ton. With a mono-repo and huge focus on readability, not to mention how many thousands of SWEs spend the majority of their time slinging protobufs around, it seems a significant fraction of day-to-day code could be largely automated.

Google absolutely has their own internal models that do exactly this. It wouldn't surprise me if Microsoft indeed does have an internal Copilot that is trained on their data, but even on the smallest risk that they leak their code, they wouldn't share that particular model.

What does "absolutely has" mean here? Have you actually heard anything about such internal models?

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

#279

Post by spott »

regularfry wrote: post #257
spott wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>extracts the essence of people's works and recreates similar works (in terms of style, etc) while cutting out the original authors completely. Only if you ask it to. At which point the person asking is at the very least culpable as well of violating someone's IP. It is also illegal for me to pay someone to write Micky Mouse fan fiction (though if I don't publish it, this gets more murky). > The argument you're sugge…

> Only if you ask it to. This isn't necessarily true. It's entirely possible for a model to regurgitate a chunk of GPL'd code without you knowing that's what it's done.

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 of left pad for example, and that it is not possible to copyright something small like that. When the code gets bigger, the likelihood of an llm spitting out large chunks of GPL’d code seems vanishingly small (without asking for something specific like that). Though I’d love to see examples to the contrary.

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

#280

Post by bsder »

sillysaurusx wrote: post #174
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…

You're getting a lot of pushback, but the EU seems to agree with you: https://creativecommons.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/CC-St... https://www.notion.so/DSM-Directive-Implementation-Tracker-3... https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/dir/2019/790/oj The TDM4 copyright exception allows datasets to be created consisting of copyrighted works, as long as there is a mechanism for rightsholders to opt out. This seems like the be…

> as long as there is a mechanism for rightsholders to opt out.

I really don't like this--opt-out never works because the scale advantages are backwards. It places the burden in the wrong place. The aggregators should have to get opt-in.

Look at YouTube. Because of "opt-out", lots of people monetize content that they have no right to and it's up to the original author to have to fight the scale of a zillion uploaders. Only the biggest entities can do that.

YouTube (and everybody else) should have to assert "You, the uploader, own this content" when they ingest it. Nothing else works.

I wouldn't mind an exemption for research use, though.

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