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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

#341

Post by satvikpendem »

otterley wrote: post #313
542458 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will you indemnify those that follow your advice? I strongly feel that this is a terrible metric for comments on the internet. First, the person you’re replying to has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by saying "yes". Second, it invites silly corner case nitpicking. Their comment is written in reasonable plain English for other users reading plain English. It’s not a legal contract, and so leaves lots of loopholes…

As an attorney, I'm of the opinion that otherwise-intelligent people who provide confidently-wrong legal opinions on the Internet should be held accountable for people following their advice. I see incorrect understandings of the law and sloppy legal analysis with dismaying frequency here, even when it comes to settled law like what "fair use" is.

This is a weird stance. Anyone can say anything on the internet, they can be legal opinions or other things. It should not be necessary to disclaim such an opinion because no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place.

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

#342

Post by satvikpendem »

jacquesm wrote: post #195
542458 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will you indemnify those that follow your advice? I strongly feel that this is a terrible metric for comments on the internet. First, the person you’re replying to has nothing to gain and a lot to lose by saying "yes". Second, it invites silly corner case nitpicking. Their comment is written in reasonable plain English for other users reading plain English. It’s not a legal contract, and so leaves lots of loopholes…

It's borderline legal advice and you have to be very careful with predicting how judges will rule on future cases. In a legal context certain words have immense power. In the context of copyright 'transformative' is one such case. It's a very fine line between 'transformative' and 'derivative' and you don't get to preempt the judiciary about how they will see things.

This is not a legal context though. I am not a lawyer, I don't claim to be a lawyer, and even if I were a lawyer, no one in the internet should be taking my comments as legal advice in the first place. One should not need to disclaim everything they write with such a statement.

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

#344

Post by livrem »

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…

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

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

#345

Post by Gigachad »

yencabulator wrote: post #331
Gigachad wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My brain contains loads of copyrighted info. And if I exactly reproduce it from memory, it's copyright infringement. But if I come up with my own work, even if using that copyrighted info to learn from, it isn't infringement.

I don't understand why people keep comparing humans and computers. The law does not treat machinery equal to a human.

How would you even know where it came from? If I commit some code, you’d have no idea if I came up with it myself or if AI generated it.

And why would it matter?

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

#346

Post by livrem »

graeme wrote: post #305
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…

Indeed. Further to this, training on data involves copying it. To do so without permission robs authors of the right to contract their work for this training, either to OpenAi or any other third party.

Every kind of web crawler has to copy data. If that part of the AI training is illegal for that reason then every web crawler ever is suddenly declared automatically illegal.

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

#347

Post by _flux »

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.

Wouldn't you then end up with code suggestions based on the style guide of a single company and limited set of languages?

It probably would not be a very desirable product in the end.

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

#348

Post by diffeomorphism »

semiquaver wrote: post #309
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…

> 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" so clearly that is a fly made out of butter. Maybe courts will agree, maybe they won't, but the analogy to human learning is quite strenuous at best.

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

#349

Post by regularfry »

spott wrote: post #279
regularfry wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

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

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

#350

Post by simion314 »

andybak wrote: post #213
simion314 wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But in this case the LLM will predict the next token based on the input data, all the input is mine , Microsoft tweaked some numbers to make the interpolation mroe correct. Imagine I get the Windows source code and rename the variables by adding a "314" after each varaible, after each function name and rebuild Windows, in your definition this is remixing and fair ?

I haven't said whether it's fair or not but oversimplifying a complex topic isn't going to shed any light. Where you like it or not this is an undecided area both legally and morally. Pretending it's clear cut is either disingenuous or delusional.

I think we agree , there is no clear line or clear answer.

My simple example is to show that is not as simple as "the AI earned from N devs GPL code and now it can spit new original code without ZERO concerns", we know how this stuff works and that it can spit out the exact training input in some cases.

So IMO a judge should ask the question "from how many people you need to steal, mix the input to be sure the output is actually original".

And about the thing "if I read someone code it is not stealing" , hyumans are different and even for humans it is not allowed to read the code of your competitor and then write new code using that knowledge.

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