Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

blogs.microsoft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 398 posts

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

#381

Post by hunter2_ »

hnlmorg wrote: post #376
Gigachad wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Works generated by AI are not copyrightable. If you take a generated work and substantially build upon it, then it's likely copyrightable.

At least that's the case for art, and I think the same logic should apply to art and code.

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

#382

Post by graeme »

livrem wrote: post #346
graeme wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Web crawlers generally allow sites to remove them from the index.

Are there any crawlers used for commercial purposes which refuse to remove sites from an index if they ask? The distinction from OpenAI is that there is no way to be removed from openai's training set.

You can remove yourself from the crawler not but not from what they previously crawled.

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

#383

Post by otterley »

satvikpendem wrote: post #341
otterley wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place.

Designing systems around what people should do, as opposed to what they actually do, has proven time and again not to work particularly well in practice. I'm sure you've seen countless examples of how people track paths through manicured grass fields. The landscaper will complain about how people should walk and they'll put up signs to no avail.

The fact is, we (including me, BTW) are frequently wrong about a lot of things, and when there's little riding on it, we can ignore that most of the time. With subjects like medicine and law, however, where a mistake can cost you your life or lots of money, we want to make sure people are getting the best advice possible. That's why we require licenses to practice medicine and law, and we have governing and ethics bodies to regulate how professionals operate their practices.

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

#384

Post by dang »

CatWChainsaw wrote: post #380
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…

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…

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and/or posting in the flamewar style? It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

p.s. Also, please don't copy/paste comments on HN.

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

#385

Post by satvikpendem »

otterley wrote: post #383
satvikpendem wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place. Designing systems around what people should do, as opposed to what they actually do, has proven time and again not to work particularly well in practice. I'm sure you've seen countless examples of how people track paths through manicured grass fields. The landscaper will complain about how peop…

> That's why we require licenses to practice medicine and law, and we have governing and ethics bodies to regulate how professionals operate their practices.

Correct, so people should (and do) go to the people who have these licenses, not random people on the internet. I don't even understand what your solution, or even problem, is. It seems like you're suggesting that everyone, whenever they speak on the internet about anything vaguely related to medicine, law, or hell, even regulated fields like engineering, should disclaim that they are not speaking in such a context. And I saw that that is a ludicrous task that is expected of one to do. So if you have any better solutions, let me know.

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

#386

Post by zarzavat »

Retric wrote: post #363
zarzavat wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Exactly, but the kinds of things that Copilot is taking are necessarily very generic. It’s not going to be taking the “special sauce” from an open source project, because that is very unlikely to be the most probable continuation of any prompt that would occur in normal usage.

Copilot is taking things like “reverse a string” or “escape HTML tags”, that have very little originality to start with. This kind of common language is analogous to the musical motifs that have been also found to be under the threshold.

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

#387

Post by otterley »

satvikpendem wrote: post #385
otterley wrote: post #383

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> no one should be using the internet as their basis of law (or medicine, etc) instead of a professional in the first place. Designing systems around what people should do, as opposed to what they actually do, has proven time and again not to work particularly well in practice. I'm sure you've seen countless examples of how people track paths through manicured grass fields. The landscaper will complain about how peop…

> That's why we require licenses to practice medicine and law, and we have governing and ethics bodies to regulate how professionals operate their practices. Correct, so people should (and do) go to the people who have these licenses, not random people on the internet. I don't even understand what your solution, or even problem, is. It seems like you're suggesting that everyone, whenever they speak on the internet ab…

One doesn't have to disclaim anything that they had the good sense not to assert in the first place.

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

#388

Post by hnlmorg »

hunter2_ wrote: post #381
hnlmorg wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Works generated by AI are not copyrightable. If you take a generated work and substantially build upon it, then it's likely copyrightable. At least that's the case for art, and I think the same logic should apply to art and code.

That hasn’t been tested in court.

But even if that were true, it’s a moot point because we are talking about the copyrighted content that the models were trained on. Hence the point the OP made that if Microsoft really wanted to reassure people then they’d promote models that were trained on Microsoft’s own code rather than handwave away these concerns with gestures of assuming theoretical liability.

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

#389

Post by hunter2_ »

hnlmorg wrote: post #388
hunter2_ wrote: post #381

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Works generated by AI are not copyrightable. If you take a generated work and substantially build upon it, then it's likely copyrightable. At least that's the case for art, and I think the same logic should apply to art and code.

That hasn’t been tested in court. But even if that were true, it’s a moot point because we are talking about the copyrighted content that the models were trained on. Hence the point the OP made that if Microsoft really wanted to reassure people then they’d promote models that were trained on Microsoft’s own code rather than handwave away these concerns with gestures of assuming theoretical liability.

Ah, ok. As for testing in court, that will be useful, but a rather official source says "created by a human author" [0] in defining the notion of copyright, which I assume is paraphrasing actual law, which I assume a judge would interpret similarly. However, I will concede that it's conceivable that if a human authors a work that then itself authors another work, the second work could potentially be attributed to the human for purposes of copyright eligibility.

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/what-is-copyright/

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

#390

Post by satvikpendem »

otterley wrote: post #387
satvikpendem wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's why we require licenses to practice medicine and law, and we have governing and ethics bodies to regulate how professionals operate their practices. Correct, so people should (and do) go to the people who have these licenses, not random people on the internet. I don't even understand what your solution, or even problem, is. It seems like you're suggesting that everyone, whenever they speak on the internet ab…

One doesn't have to disclaim anything that they had the good sense not to assert in the first place.

That's your opinion on how people should speak, not most people's, so feel free to disclaim when you yourself talk, but don't deem what other people should or should not say.
Post reply on HN