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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

#91

Post by skywhopper »

tboyd47 wrote: post #60

What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?

They're having trouble getting enterprise customers to sign up for Copilot because of uncertainty over copyright implications of generated code. So they are attempting to remove the uncertainty by claiming they will hold themselves responsible. They are betting that this will allow them to win more Copilot customers. Ultimately, Microsoft has every incentive to ensure that Copilot-generated code is legally allowed; in other words, they will want to make sure any cases that come up related to Copilot code are ruled in their favor. As such they may as well be the ones paying the legal bills. That encourages more customers to sign up and aligns incentives across the board.

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

#92

Post by thfuran »

justrealist wrote: post #66
itsoktocry wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I would consider it on you to demonstrate that you can get Copilot to produce copyrighted content without obviously asking for it.

You're asking them to go and use copilot with the intention of showing that copilot can be used to unintentionally infringe on copyright? That sounds pretty tricky.

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

#93

Post by jacquesm »

judge2020 wrote: post #56
heavyset_go wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very telling that they train on millions of developers' code, but won't use their source. If it won't violate IP rights, there shouldn't be a problem. It suggests those whose code is trained upon have something to lose if the trained models are used by others.

It's likely a clash between some high level managers, and they just haven't pushed the issue to the point that Satya has to make a decision for the org as a whole.

That's pure speculation. Whatever the reasons are they currently don't and that's a tell.

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

#94

Post by skywhopper »

naikrovek wrote: post #38

This is one of the things people on this site have been saying that Microsoft should do if they really stand behind Copilot, and now that they've done it, you have again moved the goalposts and this announcement is entirely insufficient. How dare they? amirite?

What are you talking about? You need to cite specific individuals. I'm one of the people who is skeptical of the ethics of training a huge LLM on code without the authors' permission, but I also think this is an appropriate move by Microsoft. It aligns the incentives appropriately.

But for folks that are negative on both accounts, maybe they've just learned their lesson from decades of watching Microsoft take the low road over and over again.

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

#96

Post by tboyd47 »

thesuperbigfrog wrote: post #82
tboyd47 wrote: post #60

What 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…

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 Copilot customer Bespoke Clojure Gurus, LLC will mean much larger awards in such suits. Why Microsoft would just volunteer for such a risk baffles me.

My confusion is more over the balance of revenue and expenses than just "derp, me no understand why do companies do things to make money, derp"

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

#97

Post by baz00 »

frognumber wrote: post #81
baz00 wrote: post #7

Having dealt with Microsoft for 30 years as both a power user and developer, "we believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products" , is a lie.

Can you be concrete? I would never want to be in a business partnership with Microsoft (as you are as a developer). I wouldn't want to be a competitor. I wouldn't want to be a lot of things. But as a customer? Can you name specific issues you've seen which impact corporate customers?

Mostly buggy shit that you pay for support on and they never fix. O365 weirdness and data loss. Worst was completely hosing 80 users’ machines with InTune bug.

McDonalds price, McDonalds quality. But unlike McDonalds, long lasting and expensive problems.

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

#98

Post by jacquesm »

naikrovek wrote: post #44
hulitu wrote: post #2

> 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

This may be relevant as background for that terse comment:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423899

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

#99

Post by CharlesW »

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…

> It's likely that generative AI in general will be deemed fair use, due to its (generally) transformative nature.

This isn't how "fair use" works, in the sense that there can never be a blanket assurance like that. Also, whether the result is "transformative" is just one of many factors (see audio sampling/remixing).

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

#100

Post by blibble »

jacquesm wrote: post #93
judge2020 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's likely a clash between some high level managers, and they just haven't pushed the issue to the point that Satya has to make a decision for the org as a whole.

That's pure speculation. Whatever the reasons are they currently don't and that's a tell.

seems likely to hurt the product's adoption if was trained on Microsoft's source code

who would want the genius of Teams, sharepoint, onedrive or powerbi in their product?

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