You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.
Good. Screw companies trying to assert copyright over 10 line functions that reverse a string.
Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
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Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#42With a big asterik-- "customers... must not attempt to generate infringing materials..." It hinges on what *Microsoft* decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. You'd like it to mean that it only excludes use when you're doing something you know would infringe copyright, like "reproduce the entire half life 2 source code." But who knows.
> It hinges on what Microsoft decides "attempting to generate infringing materials" means. No, ultimately, it hinges on what a court enforcing the commitment believes “attempting to generate infringing materials” means. (OTOH. it also means Microsoft ha an even bigger incentive to use its lobbying power to assure that the law is such that liability rarely occurs with the use of these tools.)
Does Microsoft assume liability to support us in court over that question as well?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#43You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.
Obviously it wouldn't be so straightforward.
Microsoft would have access to your usage history, and would be able to easily prove your intended theft as a user if any of your prompts or usage history made it clear that you were attempting to subvert a license.
If anything, this temporarily shifts the battleground out of the courts and into prompt engineering space.
It would need to look like an accident for a bad actor to pull this off.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#44> Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot Extinguish.
The logical leaps here are insane.
You're saying that if Copilot replicates GPL-licensed software, that it will kill the GPL? after all the time and money MS have spent to do this in the past, only to fail?
wtf
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know why it is just GPL people talk about. MPL, Apache, MIT licenses all have additional terms beyond a basic public domain equivalent license. None of those terms are being respected.
Compliance with MIT/X11 license just requires distributing the license file with the binary. If you infringe, it is trivial and costless to correct. Copyleft licenses are more troublesome for those who would rather not release source code. GPL is being used as a stand-in for all copyleft licenses.
It is not costless to correct if you don't know who's code was an input in the first place.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#46Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
Closed source != source available. If you put your code out there in the world it is fair game for training, because you can't stop someone from reading and understanding it. Microsoft chooses not to make its proprietary code public, hence it is not available for training.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#47It'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 database and that was deemed fair use, so something much more transformative like generative AI will likely fall under much broader consideration for fair use. Google Books was, yes, non-commercial, but the courts generally have the provision that the more transformative something is, the less it needs to adhere to the guidelines laid out for determining such fair use.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#48You can now launder GPL code with the confidence that Microsoft's world class legal team will have your back if you're sued for it.
Obviously it wouldn't be so straightforward. Microsoft would have access to your usage history, and would be able to easily prove your intended theft as a user if any of your prompts or usage history made it clear that you were attempting to subvert a license. If anything, this temporarily shifts the battleground out of the courts and into prompt engineering space. It would need to look like an accident for a bad act…
>would be able to easily prove
Possible, perhaps. But what makes you think this is easily provable? Intent is hard at the best of times.
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
>How many people here actually abide by the StackOverflow contribution license of CC-BY-SA when copying and pasting code from there? I always thought that code snippets that small are not considered by the Courts to be eligible for 'copyright protection'.
In that case, is Copilot regurgitating 25 or so lines of GPL code, less than 1% of the time, eligible for copyright protection?
Why do you think it would only be 25 lines?
Re: Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because now every copyright claim for GPL SW will hit the wall of Microsoft's lawyers.
According to the alleged playbook, the thing being extinguished is the same as the thing being extended. But Microsoft has had a wall of lawyers for a long time. Microsoft's potential first-party GPL violations would have been defended by their lawyers for decades now. This take seems to be stretching for a Microsoft bad interpretation.
> This take seems to be stretching for a Microsoft bad interpretation.
Very much. I'm ok with Microsoft haters, provided that they are clear about their bias with themselves and others. They're not, though.
There is no chance that every negative comment on this site about Microsoft is unbiased. None.