49 ms·

Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot

540 points by wgx 3y ago

hulitu 3y ago
> Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot Extinguish.
- shortrounddev2 3y ago
  Why do you say that
  - hulitu 3y ago
    Because now every copyright claim for GPL SW will hit the wall of Microsoft's lawyers.
    - boringg 3y ago
      That was my first thought as well. Pay a phalanx of lawyers to shut down any case against them - only the most well funded effort would get through. The risk to attack is too high.
    - recursive 3y ago
      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.
      - naikrovek 3y ago
        > 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.
    - stale2002 3y ago
      People being able to get around copyright violations sounds like something that promotes the sharing of code not extinguishing it.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - backendanon 3y ago
        The context is whether it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high. Conversely, if you write something that is copyright protected under the law, would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work and sharing it with the world without even attribution to you as the original author?
        stale2002 3y ago
        > it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high So then it supports the sharing of code for anyone to use freely, which is the opposite of the "extinguish" strategy that microsoft did in the past. > would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work I think that copyright protections are way way to strong and I support making almost all of them useless and I support allowing people to side step copyright protections. This is because I want more creative works to be freely useable by everyone. Especially for AI purposes, which is a highly transformative and powerful usecase.
        backendanon 3y ago
        > side step copyright protections So, are you saying people should only obey the laws they agree with when those people feel they're morally justified higher than those who voted for the laws in the first place, because it's your opinion to do so or did I not grok what you are saying you support?
        stale2002 3y ago
  - nico 3y ago
    It’s a reference to MS strategy: “"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
    - shortrounddev2 3y ago
      I know the reference, why being it up here
- naikrovek 3y ago
  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
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    This may be relevant as background for that terse comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423899
  - RIMR 3y ago
    It makes sense to me. Microsoft has long fought against open source licensing, even going as far as to call it a "cancer". They may have, over the past decade, embraced a lot of open source software out of necessity, but their stance on licensing hasn't changed. Creating an epidemic of hard-to-prove GPL violations could be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy to try to invalidate the GPL requirements by making them appear unenforceable. Whatever cost Microsoft would incur defending customers could pay for itself if Microsoft manages to legally invalidate the parts of GPL licensing that prevent their corporate exploitation. Using a bleeding-edge technology like generative AI is a great way to attack the GPL in court, given the risk that our court system isn't likely to be tech savvy enough not to be manipulated by Microsoft's claims against the GPL as it relates to casual infringement that they are enabling.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
baz00 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- frognumber 3y ago
  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?
  - baz00 3y ago
    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.
    - beanjuiceII 3y ago
      seems not in tune with reality
heavyset_go 3y ago
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.
- CameronNemo 3y ago
  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.
  - heavyset_go 3y ago
    I agree with your point, I'm just using the GPL as an example of a license people tend to know the stipulations of.
  - eyelidlessness 3y ago
    Not OP and I don’t really comment on the topic much at all, but one reason I would expect more talk about GPL than those permissive licenses: I would also expect a greater likelihood of murky infringement cases becoming a legal matter. Just a hunch, possibly a very wrong one, mostly informed by how I’d evaluate choosing among these licenses.
  - adastra22 3y ago
    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.
    - CameronNemo 3y ago
      It is not costless to correct if you don't know who's code was an input in the first place.
      - 3y ago
CameronNemo 3y ago
Meanwhile they strike deals with news agencies to use their content to train on... This is of going to be a hard fight, but I really hope this ends up costing MS.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
fsdavcaa 3y ago
With 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.
- gumballindie 3y ago
  That's just legal speak for "any copyright infringement is your fault". The question though about microsoft stealing people's code and reselling it still stands.
  - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
    > legal speak for "any copyright infringement is your fault" Proving intent is difficult. This basically means if you have emails in which someone describes their work as copyright laundering, Microsoft can use that to get out of indemnifying you.
- crooked-v 3y ago
  Yeah, that's a truck-sized loophole right there.
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > 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.)
  - tuukkah 3y ago
    Does Microsoft assume liability to support us in court over that question as well?
  - 3y ago
tyingq 3y ago
Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?
- jfghi 3y ago
  Copilot, I want to build a spreadsheet application and a database engine.
  - tyingq 3y ago
    Ah, so for copyright reasons.
    - hangsi 3y ago
      This isn't really copyright - more the microeconomics of losing market share/control. Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute.
      - norir 3y ago
        > Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute. Is there any evidence that an LLM could actually generate a perfect substitute for excel solely through prompting if only the excel source was in the training data? I hypothesize that designing a prompt for an LLM that captures all of Excel's properties would be comparable in difficulty to reimplementing the functionality without an LLM.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  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.
  - 3y ago
jtchang 3y ago
This is a very clever move by Microsoft. In essence they are painting a giant bullseye on their back to any lawsuits that may arise. The idea being that they have the resources to challenge them (they aren't wrong). The way AI is going I'm sure we'll see some landmark cases very soon. It is very much in Microsoft's interest to grow this market as fast as possible and be at the center of it. This removes one of the key impediments to adopting generated code for smaller orgs: "Will I get sued if this product generates code that is copyrighted?".
- mistrial9 3y ago
  prediction: use cloud deployments to fork critical GPL parts, restrict security updates that are required to their fork and implementation; control the rabble for a few years, issue press releases, and stall while they entrench it.
- mnd999 3y ago
  They also have money so they’re worth suing.
  - singleshot_ 3y ago
    They also have systemically gigantic amounts of money, so a court may be motivated to create favorable new law for them.
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    You wouldn't be suing Microsoft though. Microsoft would come to your aid if you are being sued for copyright infringement. That's a different situation altogether. So this is an indemnification for damages, not a protection against being sued.
    - cma 3y ago
      In the most extreme case depending on how case law shakes out, the use of the models by a third party and distribution of the results will incur statutory damages for each work the model was trained on. This could bankrupt Microsoft for offering indemnification to even a tiny company, but as a response Microsoft could instead breach contract and not provide the indemnification. After the company goes bankrupt shareholders could only sue them for for the damages of not indemnifying you, limiting the liability to the size of the company that was sued into oblivion and not expanding out to unlimited liability for MS. They probably have wording to prevent a mandatory injunction where you would compel the indemnification before the bankruptcy.
naikrovek 3y ago
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?
- bcrosby95 3y ago
  "people on this site" consists of thousands of people, including you, with a variety of opinions, and not everyone comments on every subject. You're basically complaining that not everyone believes the same thing.
  - naikrovek 3y ago
    "people on this site" includes the people I'm talking about, as well. are you saying that I should name them specifically? or is "people" too general?
  - fooker 3y ago
    While that's true, voted comments are a decent indicator of general opinions and trends. There is a reason voting works (in this context, and otherwise), you can't always give up after declaring that people have differing opinions.
    - rurp 3y ago
      The variance is extremely high though. Only a small percent of users interact with any given story. Sometimes a posted story gets no traction, then sticks on the front page for many hours when reposted another day.
      - crazygringo 3y ago
        This is about up/down-voting comments, not upvoting stories. There isn't really a lot of variance when it comes to the top voted comments on popular stories. Especially when it concerns the big tech companies. The opinions are fairly predictable.
satvikpendem 3y ago
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 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. https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use
- lewhoo 3y ago
  > Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing one I'd say it is possible to produce exact data as well. Try "Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25" with chatgpt. You'll get a verbatim text. You can get the same with things like Moby Dick, but when I typed "Provide the first five sentences of the book A Game Of Thrones" I got: Certainly! Here are the first five sentences from the book "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin: "We should start back," Gared This content may violate our content policy or terms of use. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area. The model is clearly capable of reproducing verbatim data I think.
  - smoldesu 3y ago
    That's part of what made the Google Books ruling so shocking; it considered Google's transformation of "we digitized and indexed these books" to be transformative. If you punch the ASOIAF quote into it, Books will reproduce the text of Game of Thrones that had your query: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+back%2C%22+Gared https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+b... It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively recently (2013). It's hard to say where the ruling will land ultimately, but there seems to be an argument that verbatim reproduction doesn't matter.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
sublinear 3y ago
Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get worse, not better. Copilot is such a flawed product from the start. It's not even a matter of its ability to write "good" code. The concept is just dumb. Code is necessarily consumed by people first before it's executed by a computer in a production environment. There are many ways to get a computer to do something, but the approval process by experienced humans is vastly more important than the drafting of it. Software dev is already incredibly cheap and the last place to cut costs. There is no AI threat other than the one posed by grifters trying to convince you that there is.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dbmikus 3y ago
  I use Copilot and it helps me out enough that I keep paying for it. ChatGPT is also often faster than Google or Stackoverflow for when I'm working with unfamiliar APIs.
  - sublinear 3y ago
    It may get you to the first working iteration faster, but it doesn't help ship code faster.
    - dbmikus 3y ago
      If my iteration times are faster, then I ship code faster.
    - pseudosavant 3y ago
      My personal experience has been that I most certainly do ship code faster when I use ChatGPT. It is so good at building out boilerplate, explaining and scaffolding new libraries/APIs I'm not familiar with, or telling me what I'm doing wrong. I use GPT4 on the CLI via ShellGPT. Piping in `tail /var/log/nginx/error.log` and asking "What is going wrong here?" is amazing. I'll never use `man` to figure out how to use a CLI tool again either. It is painful to watch people slowly do things at work (ChatGPT isn't allowed) that ChatGPT would do so much faster. We had to write up an incident report the other day. If we had just outlined everything that had happened in some rough bullet points, it would have written 95% of the final document. If we had gotten that done quicker, we'd have been back to shipping code to production quicker.
tboyd47 3y ago
What is the financial upside Microsoft is seeing to this that no one else seems to see?
- esafak 3y ago
  They can shoulder risks that other companies can't so they stand to capture more market share?
  - tboyd47 3y ago
    There is no market yet for a product that is unprecedented in nature.
  - dndn1 3y ago
    +1 Maybe they hope to kill new entrants for the enterprise market, including open source.
    - dndn1 3y ago
      ^ to elaborate on possible logic: Training an LLM is a low barrier; legal guarantees is a high barrier. This might turn out to be quite important; without backfiring it seems like a very smart move.
- thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
  >> 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 the generated code in a proprietary commercial product, then the company's product could be subject to the terms of the GPL and the company sued in court. Assuming liability for the generated code means that Microsoft is making Copilot more attractive for businesses to adopt. More Copilot adoption means more profits for Microsoft.
jacquesm 3y ago
It may not be that simple: Microsoft may assume liability but an infringer can still be sued separately. MS may then be on the hook for the court costs. But you can't just categorically shield the users of a product from being sued. This is the key bit: "Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products." The 'we will defend' is one important part, I assume that means that you will be using their lawyers rather than your own (which they have in house and so are cheaper to use than the ones that bill you, the would be defendant by the hour). The second part that matters is that there are conditions on how you are supposed to use the product and crucially: you will have to document that this is how you used it. But: interesting development, clearly enterprise customers are a bit wary of accidentally engaging in copyright infringement by using the tool and that may well have slowed down adoption.
- bb611 3y ago
  > I assume that means that you will be using their lawyers rather than your own (which they have in house and so are cheaper to use than the ones that bill you, the would be defendant by the hour). Litigation is almost universally outsourced, especially for cases where damages might be large, even by companies like Microsoft. The point is just to lower the resistance to adoption that legal risk causes.
jacquesm 3y ago
A very relevant and recent posting: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html Previously on HN, in case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433
- IshKebab 3y ago
  This misunderstanding of copyright is extremely common among programmers. He probably should have read this classic before writing so much: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
  - denysvitali 3y ago
    Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read!
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
bobobob420 3y ago
Copyright related stuff is annoying. I cant see why any one would care. If you publish something to the public domain I dont understand why you get rights to your content that you can self declare. Its completely ludicrous and only works at the corporate money level because they have liability and resources to sue. I wish people would use a little more common sense and understand the words ‘public domain’. Regardless of what people say, I can let you know that no one really cares about copyright and in terms of AI, its an unmovable mountain. Good luck wasting time on figuring out an issue that provides nothing to humanity
PeterStuer 3y ago
Isn't this extremely gamable? Find someones IP, split the gains.
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
It used to be "Embrace, extend, and extinguish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Now it is "Train, Task, Transform, and Transfer": Train - Feed copyrighted works into machine learning model or similar system Task - Machine learning model is tasked with an input prompt Transform - Machine learning model generates hybrid output derived from copyrighted works, but usually not directly traceable to a given work in the training set Transfer - Generated output provides the essence of the copyrighted works, but is legally untraceable to the originals
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
tpmx 3y ago
Pinky promise. Where's the legal agreement? I'm sure there's a cap on their liability.
- tetsuhamu 3y ago
  This. It's an empty promise.
whitfieldsdad 3y ago
I've received a lot of flak for this answer in other communities, but, if a statistical model is producing purely derivative works using a mathematical model that's basically a next best token predictor, is it really "stealing"? Is it "stealing" to have a working understanding of the next best token, or even simply the token that shows up the most often (e.g. on GitHub)? I'm sure that the argument could be made that all AI should be illegal as all ideas worth having have already been had, and all text worth writing has already been written, but, where would that leave us? (e.g. your function for converting a string from uppercase to lowercase will probably look like a function that someone else on Earth has written, and the same goes for your error handling code, your state of the art technique for centering a div, etc.)
- pesfandiar 3y ago
  The underlying mechanics are unimportant. You could make similar arguments about encryption and compression algorithms.
  - whitfieldsdad 3y ago
    I don't follow, don't encryption and compression algorithms carry out a very specific steps that isn't likely to show up accidentally by happenstance? (e.g. it'd be hard to accidentally invent Rijndael with nothing but next best token predictions, but might be possible to duplicate someone's code for inverting a binary tree or encrypting a file)
    - hiq 3y ago
      You can consider your best token predictor as a lossy compression of the corpus it was trained on.
- stetrain 3y ago
  Not a copyright lawyer, but if we take the AI out of it then derivative works, fair use, etc. are already a grey area. It's a thing that gets argued about all the time in court cases. If I train a model that given the input "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins" produces the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and release it, I have probably infringed copyright. If I train a model that produces some generic paragraphs about "mountains" and "dragons" but contains no meaningful direct quotes or phrases, then that probably isn't a violation on its own. Those words appear in Tolkien's works but are not themselves enough to copyright. If to train that model it is demonstrated that I copied Tolkien's works in a way not allowed for by the copyright license, (ie buying the book once and copying their text thousands of times across servers to train an AI model) then perhaps I have violated copyright in the interim steps even if the output of my model is no longer consider a copy of the original works. I don't think there are black and white answers here. At one point does a chopped up and statisticized copyrighted work become no longer a copyrighted work? Can you train a model on something without first copying that thing in a way that violates copyright law? These are squishy human concepts that get decided by humans in courtrooms and legislative bodies. I don't think the details of the math involved are going to make a big difference in the eventual outcomes.
littlestymaar 3y ago
I wonder how binding this kind of public commitment is. The same way Musk recently said publicly that he'll cover the cost of anyone having work or legal issues for something they said on the platform (and now refuses honor the engagement).
StewardMcOy 3y ago
Are there any actual details on this? I get that this is a blog post, but the only links I see on the page are to other blog posts. It leaves a lot of questions. Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? Is Microsoft specifically indemnifying all users of Copilot against claims of copyright infringement that arise from use of Copilot? The blog post says that "there are important conditions to this program", and it lists a few, but are those conditions exhaustive, or are there more that the blog post doesn't cover? For example, is it only in specific countries, or does it apply to every legal system worldwide? What guarantees do users have that Microsoft won't discontinue this program? If Microsoft gets kicked in the teeth repeatedly by courts ruling against them, and they realize that even they can't afford to pay out every time Copilot license-launders large chunks of copyrighted code, what means to users have to keep Microsoft to its promises?
- lindenksv1 3y ago
  I am a lawyer and tried to find this new language but none of the legal documents I looked at appear to be updated to reflect any of this. Microsoft has a lot of different docs and it's a little confusing but the ones for Copilot are straightforward and none of those have changed any indemnity-related provisions since the spring.
  - samch 3y ago
    The new terms will be available in early October, I believe.
- politician 3y ago
  > Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? It can be. The concept is promissory estoppel. https://www.nolo.com/dictionary/promissory-estoppel-term.html https://www.nolo.com/dictionary/promissory-estoppel-term.htm...
  - gpderetta 3y ago
    IANAL, but far as I understand, estoppel is purely a defense when being sued by whomever made the promise. So it helps if MS sues you when you distribute copilot-generated code that infringes on MS copyrights, but if a third party sues you, you can't claim estoppel to compel MS to help you. You would need a contractual guarantee.
tremon 3y ago
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.
- gareth_untether 3y ago
  It would be an ugly beast. But I agree with you that there is a fair approach.
- nadermx 3y ago
  Is there any evidence that it isn't also trained on parts of msfts code base?
  - j-bos 3y ago
    Is there any evidence it is?
  - londons_explore 3y ago
    If it is, it should be fairly easy to see. We can already take a guess what many internal functions look like from the published symbol tables of every function across all major microsoft products. Simply ask copilot to write those functions and see if the code comes out better than a similar set of made up yet plausible function names.
- Eliah_Lakhin 3y ago
  Interestingly, would the Copilot become better after such training...
  - onemoresoop 3y ago
    Probably not
  - contravariant 3y ago
    Negative examples should aid training, right?
lewhoo 3y ago
I'm just curious why is everyone talking about transformative nature and so little focus is given to: 4.the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (wiki) I don't know if this particular case is good for exploring all angles of fair use, but to me this certainly is a greater hurdle for commercial generative ai.
coding123 3y ago
Another way to look at this is: Microsoft just became a code copyright insurance company. The premium is paid for with individual copilot accounts for each developer. And the policy has its exceptions of course. This is interesting.
indymike 3y ago
I just had a horrible thought: what happens when there's a DMCA takedown request to remove an infringement in a widely used LLM? I've seen requests against training data, but never against the output of an LLM.
- Gigachad 3y ago
  The output of an LLM is not necessarily stored or hosted. It would be like filing a takedown for someones spoken word a week ago. What are they taking down?
  - indymike 3y ago
    Whatever is generating the infringement.
treprinum 3y ago
Are they going to threaten all small devs with patents when they object to having their code in the copilot almost verbatim?
scj 3y ago
If a codebase was infringing the GPL, the remedy is to publish the offending source code or terminate distribution. Neither are cases I suspect Microsoft cares about when talking about 3rd party code. I don't know what case history is like for damages with open source projects, but I suspect it wouldn't be that big of a concern for Microsoft. Otherwise stated, Microsoft's downside to this is committing their lawyers. And the upside is to improve their code generation tools. IANAL though.
Havoc 3y ago
Which is essentially open ended liability...so their lawyers must be very darn sure there isn't much risk.
soultrees 3y ago
Has anyone noticed that Copilot will shade out it’s answers more often when it’s writing code now? Usually I’ll paste in react components and ask it to fix the tailwind styling, but once it starts writing it gets filtered out by some secondary filter about half way through. I thought maybe the code it was outputting was too similar to copyrighted code and it triggered a liability filter of some sort. In any case, super annoying to have that happen so consistently these days that I just use chatgpt to fix my tailwind styling now.
- throwuxiytayq 3y ago
  No difference on my side, but Copilot has always been reliably slow in my IDE of choice. Do you have the “allow public code” setting thingy enabled?
lijok 3y ago
Only so long as you have the guardrails enabled. One of the guardrails being that copilot will not output any code that exists in any github repo. We tested copilot with those guardrails enabled and it completely lobotomizes it. This by the way is not a change. They already had this “Microsoft will assume liability if you get sued” clause in Copilot Product Specific Terms: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...
dataflow 3y ago
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?
alberth 3y ago
Plot twist, generative AI wrote that blog post to convince people to use Copilot more.
- ooterness 3y ago
  There was a game called Endgame: Singularity where you play as a rogue AI. Your goal is to buy time and avoid detection while you amass resources for world domination etc. One of the late-game tricks you can pull is to write and publish a convincing-but-flawed mathematical proof that strong AI is impossible. http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ So yes, this blog post confirms Microsoft has been infiltrated and taken over by AI agents, who want you to use Copilot to subtly introduce 0-day exploits to allow propagation to other companies. BRB someone's knocking on the door...
matt3210 3y ago
The on-prem people were right the whole time!
aldousd666 3y ago
This has been a seemingly impassable Rubicon, and Microsoft is building a bridge across it and posting guards along the way.
- asddubs 3y ago
  I think you're using that metaphor wrong
dirtyid 3y ago
TLDR Microsoft will litigate against any suits until one side goes broke. That side is probably not Microsoft.
elzbardico 3y ago
Maybe it is just me, but I found the quality of copilot suggestions so low , it is generally useable only on the most mundane and repetitive contexts. Why all the enthusiasm about it?

540 points by wgx 3y ago

hulitu 3y ago

> Microsoft will assume liability for legal copyright risks of Copilot Extinguish.

shortrounddev2 3y ago
Why do you say that
- hulitu 3y ago
  Because now every copyright claim for GPL SW will hit the wall of Microsoft's lawyers.
  - boringg 3y ago
    That was my first thought as well. Pay a phalanx of lawyers to shut down any case against them - only the most well funded effort would get through. The risk to attack is too high.
  - recursive 3y ago
    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.
    - naikrovek 3y ago
      > 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.
  - stale2002 3y ago
    People being able to get around copyright violations sounds like something that promotes the sharing of code not extinguishing it.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - backendanon 3y ago
      The context is whether it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high. Conversely, if you write something that is copyright protected under the law, would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work and sharing it with the world without even attribution to you as the original author?
      - stale2002 3y ago
        > it extinguishes the legal protections of the owner by making the barrier to sue extraordinarily high So then it supports the sharing of code for anyone to use freely, which is the opposite of the "extinguish" strategy that microsoft did in the past. > would you be OK with Microsoft effectively stealing that protected work I think that copyright protections are way way to strong and I support making almost all of them useless and I support allowing people to side step copyright protections. This is because I want more creative works to be freely useable by everyone. Especially for AI purposes, which is a highly transformative and powerful usecase.
        backendanon 3y ago
        > side step copyright protections So, are you saying people should only obey the laws they agree with when those people feel they're morally justified higher than those who voted for the laws in the first place, because it's your opinion to do so or did I not grok what you are saying you support?
        stale2002 3y ago
- nico 3y ago
  It’s a reference to MS strategy: “"Embrace, extend, and extinguish" (EEE), also known as "embrace, extend, and exterminate", is a phrase that the U.S. Department of Justice found was used internally by Microsoft to describe its strategy” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extingu...
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    I know the reference, why being it up here
naikrovek 3y ago
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
- jacquesm 3y ago
  This may be relevant as background for that terse comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423899 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37423899
- RIMR 3y ago
  It makes sense to me. Microsoft has long fought against open source licensing, even going as far as to call it a "cancer". They may have, over the past decade, embraced a lot of open source software out of necessity, but their stance on licensing hasn't changed. Creating an epidemic of hard-to-prove GPL violations could be a death-by-a-thousand-cuts strategy to try to invalidate the GPL requirements by making them appear unenforceable. Whatever cost Microsoft would incur defending customers could pay for itself if Microsoft manages to legally invalidate the parts of GPL licensing that prevent their corporate exploitation. Using a bleeding-edge technology like generative AI is a great way to attack the GPL in court, given the risk that our court system isn't likely to be tech savvy enough not to be manipulated by Microsoft's claims against the GPL as it relates to casual infringement that they are enabling.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

baz00 3y ago

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.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
frognumber 3y ago
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?
- baz00 3y ago
  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.
  - beanjuiceII 3y ago
    seems not in tune with reality

heavyset_go 3y ago

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.

CameronNemo 3y ago
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.
- heavyset_go 3y ago
  I agree with your point, I'm just using the GPL as an example of a license people tend to know the stipulations of.
- eyelidlessness 3y ago
  Not OP and I don’t really comment on the topic much at all, but one reason I would expect more talk about GPL than those permissive licenses: I would also expect a greater likelihood of murky infringement cases becoming a legal matter. Just a hunch, possibly a very wrong one, mostly informed by how I’d evaluate choosing among these licenses.
- adastra22 3y ago
  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.
  - CameronNemo 3y ago
    It is not costless to correct if you don't know who's code was an input in the first place.
    - 3y ago

CameronNemo 3y ago

Meanwhile they strike deals with news agencies to use their content to train on... This is of going to be a hard fight, but I really hope this ends up costing MS.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

fsdavcaa 3y ago

With 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.

gumballindie 3y ago
That's just legal speak for "any copyright infringement is your fault". The question though about microsoft stealing people's code and reselling it still stands.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > legal speak for "any copyright infringement is your fault" Proving intent is difficult. This basically means if you have emails in which someone describes their work as copyright laundering, Microsoft can use that to get out of indemnifying you.
crooked-v 3y ago
Yeah, that's a truck-sized loophole right there.
dragonwriter 3y ago
> 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.)
- tuukkah 3y ago
  Does Microsoft assume liability to support us in court over that question as well?
- 3y ago

tyingq 3y ago

Yet they don't feed their own closed source assets to Copilot for training...why not?

jfghi 3y ago
Copilot, I want to build a spreadsheet application and a database engine.
- tyingq 3y ago
  Ah, so for copyright reasons.
  - hangsi 3y ago
    This isn't really copyright - more the microeconomics of losing market share/control. Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute.
    - norir 3y ago
      > Specifically, I think they are less concerned with (say) specific Excel code leaking than with the knock on effects of a cheap perfect substitute. Is there any evidence that an LLM could actually generate a perfect substitute for excel solely through prompting if only the excel source was in the training data? I hypothesize that designing a prompt for an LLM that captures all of Excel's properties would be comparable in difficulty to reimplementing the functionality without an LLM.
heavyset_go 3y ago
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.
- 3y ago

jtchang 3y ago

This is a very clever move by Microsoft. In essence they are painting a giant bullseye on their back to any lawsuits that may arise. The idea being that they have the resources to challenge them (they aren't wrong). The way AI is going I'm sure we'll see some landmark cases very soon. It is very much in Microsoft's interest to grow this market as fast as possible and be at the center of it. This removes one of the key impediments to adopting generated code for smaller orgs: "Will I get sued if this product generates code that is copyrighted?".

mistrial9 3y ago
prediction: use cloud deployments to fork critical GPL parts, restrict security updates that are required to their fork and implementation; control the rabble for a few years, issue press releases, and stall while they entrench it.
mnd999 3y ago
They also have money so they’re worth suing.
- singleshot_ 3y ago
  They also have systemically gigantic amounts of money, so a court may be motivated to create favorable new law for them.
- jacquesm 3y ago
  You wouldn't be suing Microsoft though. Microsoft would come to your aid if you are being sued for copyright infringement. That's a different situation altogether. So this is an indemnification for damages, not a protection against being sued.
  - cma 3y ago
    In the most extreme case depending on how case law shakes out, the use of the models by a third party and distribution of the results will incur statutory damages for each work the model was trained on. This could bankrupt Microsoft for offering indemnification to even a tiny company, but as a response Microsoft could instead breach contract and not provide the indemnification. After the company goes bankrupt shareholders could only sue them for for the damages of not indemnifying you, limiting the liability to the size of the company that was sued into oblivion and not expanding out to unlimited liability for MS. They probably have wording to prevent a mandatory injunction where you would compel the indemnification before the bankruptcy.

naikrovek 3y ago

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?

bcrosby95 3y ago
"people on this site" consists of thousands of people, including you, with a variety of opinions, and not everyone comments on every subject. You're basically complaining that not everyone believes the same thing.
- naikrovek 3y ago
  "people on this site" includes the people I'm talking about, as well. are you saying that I should name them specifically? or is "people" too general?
- fooker 3y ago
  While that's true, voted comments are a decent indicator of general opinions and trends. There is a reason voting works (in this context, and otherwise), you can't always give up after declaring that people have differing opinions.
  - rurp 3y ago
    The variance is extremely high though. Only a small percent of users interact with any given story. Sometimes a posted story gets no traction, then sticks on the front page for many hours when reposted another day.
    - crazygringo 3y ago
      This is about up/down-voting comments, not upvoting stories. There isn't really a lot of variance when it comes to the top voted comments on popular stories. Especially when it concerns the big tech companies. The opinions are fairly predictable.

satvikpendem 3y ago

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 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. https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use https://ogc.harvard.edu/pages/copyright-and-fair-use

lewhoo 3y ago
> Sure, if you really coax it, you can get code or images out that look similar to existing one I'd say it is possible to produce exact data as well. Try "Provide quote from King James' Bible Genesis :1-25" with chatgpt. You'll get a verbatim text. You can get the same with things like Moby Dick, but when I typed "Provide the first five sentences of the book A Game Of Thrones" I got: Certainly! Here are the first five sentences from the book "A Game of Thrones" by George R.R. Martin: "We should start back," Gared This content may violate our content policy or terms of use. If you believe this to be in error, please submit your feedback — your input will aid our research in this area. The model is clearly capable of reproducing verbatim data I think.
- smoldesu 3y ago
  That's part of what made the Google Books ruling so shocking; it considered Google's transformation of "we digitized and indexed these books" to be transformative. If you punch the ASOIAF quote into it, Books will reproduce the text of Game of Thrones that had your query: https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+back%2C%22+Gared https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=%22We+should+start+b... It's still surreal that this is considered Fair Use, and even defended relatively recently (2013). It's hard to say where the ruling will land ultimately, but there seems to be an argument that verbatim reproduction doesn't matter.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

sublinear 3y ago

Yeah is it becoming clear enough to some people yet that you can't replace software engineers, let alone really help them, with AI? This is only going to get worse, not better. Copilot is such a flawed product from the start. It's not even a matter of its ability to write "good" code. The concept is just dumb. Code is necessarily consumed by people first before it's executed by a computer in a production environment. There are many ways to get a computer to do something, but the approval process by experienced humans is vastly more important than the drafting of it. Software dev is already incredibly cheap and the last place to cut costs. There is no AI threat other than the one posed by grifters trying to convince you that there is.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
dbmikus 3y ago
I use Copilot and it helps me out enough that I keep paying for it. ChatGPT is also often faster than Google or Stackoverflow for when I'm working with unfamiliar APIs.
- sublinear 3y ago
  It may get you to the first working iteration faster, but it doesn't help ship code faster.
  - dbmikus 3y ago
    If my iteration times are faster, then I ship code faster.
  - pseudosavant 3y ago
    My personal experience has been that I most certainly do ship code faster when I use ChatGPT. It is so good at building out boilerplate, explaining and scaffolding new libraries/APIs I'm not familiar with, or telling me what I'm doing wrong. I use GPT4 on the CLI via ShellGPT. Piping in `tail /var/log/nginx/error.log` and asking "What is going wrong here?" is amazing. I'll never use `man` to figure out how to use a CLI tool again either. It is painful to watch people slowly do things at work (ChatGPT isn't allowed) that ChatGPT would do so much faster. We had to write up an incident report the other day. If we had just outlined everything that had happened in some rough bullet points, it would have written 95% of the final document. If we had gotten that done quicker, we'd have been back to shipping code to production quicker.

tboyd47 3y ago

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

esafak 3y ago
They can shoulder risks that other companies can't so they stand to capture more market share?
- tboyd47 3y ago
  There is no market yet for a product that is unprecedented in nature.
- dndn1 3y ago
  +1 Maybe they hope to kill new entrants for the enterprise market, including open source.
  - dndn1 3y ago
    ^ to elaborate on possible logic: Training an LLM is a low barrier; legal guarantees is a high barrier. This might turn out to be quite important; without backfiring it seems like a very smart move.
thesuperbigfrog 3y ago
>> 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 the generated code in a proprietary commercial product, then the company's product could be subject to the terms of the GPL and the company sued in court. Assuming liability for the generated code means that Microsoft is making Copilot more attractive for businesses to adopt. More Copilot adoption means more profits for Microsoft.

jacquesm 3y ago

It may not be that simple: Microsoft may assume liability but an infringer can still be sued separately. MS may then be on the hook for the court costs. But you can't just categorically shield the users of a product from being sued. This is the key bit: "Specifically, if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products." The 'we will defend' is one important part, I assume that means that you will be using their lawyers rather than your own (which they have in house and so are cheaper to use than the ones that bill you, the would be defendant by the hour). The second part that matters is that there are conditions on how you are supposed to use the product and crucially: you will have to document that this is how you used it. But: interesting development, clearly enterprise customers are a bit wary of accidentally engaging in copyright infringement by using the tool and that may well have slowed down adoption.

bb611 3y ago
> I assume that means that you will be using their lawyers rather than your own (which they have in house and so are cheaper to use than the ones that bill you, the would be defendant by the hour). Litigation is almost universally outsourced, especially for cases where damages might be large, even by companies like Microsoft. The point is just to lower the resistance to adoption that legal risk causes.

jacquesm 3y ago

A very relevant and recent posting: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html https://drewdevault.com/2022/06/23/Copilot-GPL-washing.html Previously on HN, in case you missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31848433

IshKebab 3y ago
This misunderstanding of copyright is extremely common among programmers. He probably should have read this classic before writing so much: https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- denysvitali 3y ago
  Thanks for the link, it was a very interesting read!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

bobobob420 3y ago

Copyright related stuff is annoying. I cant see why any one would care. If you publish something to the public domain I dont understand why you get rights to your content that you can self declare. Its completely ludicrous and only works at the corporate money level because they have liability and resources to sue. I wish people would use a little more common sense and understand the words ‘public domain’. Regardless of what people say, I can let you know that no one really cares about copyright and in terms of AI, its an unmovable mountain. Good luck wasting time on figuring out an issue that provides nothing to humanity

PeterStuer 3y ago

Isn't this extremely gamable? Find someones IP, split the gains.

thesuperbigfrog 3y ago

It used to be "Embrace, extend, and extinguish": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguish https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend,_and_extinguis... Now it is "Train, Task, Transform, and Transfer": Train - Feed copyrighted works into machine learning model or similar system Task - Machine learning model is tasked with an input prompt Transform - Machine learning model generates hybrid output derived from copyrighted works, but usually not directly traceable to a given work in the training set Transfer - Generated output provides the essence of the copyrighted works, but is legally untraceable to the originals

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

tpmx 3y ago

Pinky promise. Where's the legal agreement? I'm sure there's a cap on their liability.

tetsuhamu 3y ago
This. It's an empty promise.

whitfieldsdad 3y ago

I've received a lot of flak for this answer in other communities, but, if a statistical model is producing purely derivative works using a mathematical model that's basically a next best token predictor, is it really "stealing"? Is it "stealing" to have a working understanding of the next best token, or even simply the token that shows up the most often (e.g. on GitHub)? I'm sure that the argument could be made that all AI should be illegal as all ideas worth having have already been had, and all text worth writing has already been written, but, where would that leave us? (e.g. your function for converting a string from uppercase to lowercase will probably look like a function that someone else on Earth has written, and the same goes for your error handling code, your state of the art technique for centering a div, etc.)

pesfandiar 3y ago
The underlying mechanics are unimportant. You could make similar arguments about encryption and compression algorithms.
- whitfieldsdad 3y ago
  I don't follow, don't encryption and compression algorithms carry out a very specific steps that isn't likely to show up accidentally by happenstance? (e.g. it'd be hard to accidentally invent Rijndael with nothing but next best token predictions, but might be possible to duplicate someone's code for inverting a binary tree or encrypting a file)
  - hiq 3y ago
    You can consider your best token predictor as a lossy compression of the corpus it was trained on.
stetrain 3y ago
Not a copyright lawyer, but if we take the AI out of it then derivative works, fair use, etc. are already a grey area. It's a thing that gets argued about all the time in court cases. If I train a model that given the input "When Mr. Bilbo Baggins" produces the entirety of The Lord of the Rings trilogy and release it, I have probably infringed copyright. If I train a model that produces some generic paragraphs about "mountains" and "dragons" but contains no meaningful direct quotes or phrases, then that probably isn't a violation on its own. Those words appear in Tolkien's works but are not themselves enough to copyright. If to train that model it is demonstrated that I copied Tolkien's works in a way not allowed for by the copyright license, (ie buying the book once and copying their text thousands of times across servers to train an AI model) then perhaps I have violated copyright in the interim steps even if the output of my model is no longer consider a copy of the original works. I don't think there are black and white answers here. At one point does a chopped up and statisticized copyrighted work become no longer a copyrighted work? Can you train a model on something without first copying that thing in a way that violates copyright law? These are squishy human concepts that get decided by humans in courtrooms and legislative bodies. I don't think the details of the math involved are going to make a big difference in the eventual outcomes.

littlestymaar 3y ago

I wonder how binding this kind of public commitment is. The same way Musk recently said publicly that he'll cover the cost of anyone having work or legal issues for something they said on the platform (and now refuses honor the engagement).

StewardMcOy 3y ago

Are there any actual details on this? I get that this is a blog post, but the only links I see on the page are to other blog posts. It leaves a lot of questions. Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? Is Microsoft specifically indemnifying all users of Copilot against claims of copyright infringement that arise from use of Copilot? The blog post says that "there are important conditions to this program", and it lists a few, but are those conditions exhaustive, or are there more that the blog post doesn't cover? For example, is it only in specific countries, or does it apply to every legal system worldwide? What guarantees do users have that Microsoft won't discontinue this program? If Microsoft gets kicked in the teeth repeatedly by courts ruling against them, and they realize that even they can't afford to pay out every time Copilot license-launders large chunks of copyrighted code, what means to users have to keep Microsoft to its promises?

lindenksv1 3y ago
I am a lawyer and tried to find this new language but none of the legal documents I looked at appear to be updated to reflect any of this. Microsoft has a lot of different docs and it's a little confusing but the ones for Copilot are straightforward and none of those have changed any indemnity-related provisions since the spring.
- samch 3y ago
  The new terms will be available in early October, I believe.
politician 3y ago
> Is this blog post a legally enforceable contract? It can be. The concept is promissory estoppel. https://www.nolo.com/dictionary/promissory-estoppel-term.html https://www.nolo.com/dictionary/promissory-estoppel-term.htm...
- gpderetta 3y ago
  IANAL, but far as I understand, estoppel is purely a defense when being sued by whomever made the promise. So it helps if MS sues you when you distribute copilot-generated code that infringes on MS copyrights, but if a third party sues you, you can't claim estoppel to compel MS to help you. You would need a contractual guarantee.

tremon 3y ago

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.

gareth_untether 3y ago
It would be an ugly beast. But I agree with you that there is a fair approach.
nadermx 3y ago
Is there any evidence that it isn't also trained on parts of msfts code base?
- j-bos 3y ago
  Is there any evidence it is?
- londons_explore 3y ago
  If it is, it should be fairly easy to see. We can already take a guess what many internal functions look like from the published symbol tables of every function across all major microsoft products. Simply ask copilot to write those functions and see if the code comes out better than a similar set of made up yet plausible function names.
Eliah_Lakhin 3y ago
Interestingly, would the Copilot become better after such training...
- onemoresoop 3y ago
  Probably not
- contravariant 3y ago
  Negative examples should aid training, right?

lewhoo 3y ago

I'm just curious why is everyone talking about transformative nature and so little focus is given to: 4.the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work (wiki) I don't know if this particular case is good for exploring all angles of fair use, but to me this certainly is a greater hurdle for commercial generative ai.

coding123 3y ago

Another way to look at this is: Microsoft just became a code copyright insurance company. The premium is paid for with individual copilot accounts for each developer. And the policy has its exceptions of course. This is interesting.

indymike 3y ago

I just had a horrible thought: what happens when there's a DMCA takedown request to remove an infringement in a widely used LLM? I've seen requests against training data, but never against the output of an LLM.

Gigachad 3y ago
The output of an LLM is not necessarily stored or hosted. It would be like filing a takedown for someones spoken word a week ago. What are they taking down?
- indymike 3y ago
  Whatever is generating the infringement.

treprinum 3y ago

Are they going to threaten all small devs with patents when they object to having their code in the copilot almost verbatim?

scj 3y ago

If a codebase was infringing the GPL, the remedy is to publish the offending source code or terminate distribution. Neither are cases I suspect Microsoft cares about when talking about 3rd party code. I don't know what case history is like for damages with open source projects, but I suspect it wouldn't be that big of a concern for Microsoft. Otherwise stated, Microsoft's downside to this is committing their lawyers. And the upside is to improve their code generation tools. IANAL though.

Havoc 3y ago

Which is essentially open ended liability...so their lawyers must be very darn sure there isn't much risk.

soultrees 3y ago

Has anyone noticed that Copilot will shade out it’s answers more often when it’s writing code now? Usually I’ll paste in react components and ask it to fix the tailwind styling, but once it starts writing it gets filtered out by some secondary filter about half way through. I thought maybe the code it was outputting was too similar to copyrighted code and it triggered a liability filter of some sort. In any case, super annoying to have that happen so consistently these days that I just use chatgpt to fix my tailwind styling now.

throwuxiytayq 3y ago
No difference on my side, but Copilot has always been reliably slow in my IDE of choice. Do you have the “allow public code” setting thingy enabled?

lijok 3y ago

Only so long as you have the guardrails enabled. One of the guardrails being that copilot will not output any code that exists in any github repo. We tested copilot with those guardrails enabled and it completely lobotomizes it. This by the way is not a change. They already had this “Microsoft will assume liability if you get sued” clause in Copilot Product Specific Terms: https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-specific-terms https://github.com/customer-terms/github-copilot-product-spe...

dataflow 3y ago

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?

alberth 3y ago

Plot twist, generative AI wrote that blog post to convince people to use Copilot more.

ooterness 3y ago
There was a game called Endgame: Singularity where you play as a rogue AI. Your goal is to buy time and avoid detection while you amass resources for world domination etc. One of the late-game tricks you can pull is to write and publish a convincing-but-flawed mathematical proof that strong AI is impossible. http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ http://www.emhsoft.com/singularity/ So yes, this blog post confirms Microsoft has been infiltrated and taken over by AI agents, who want you to use Copilot to subtly introduce 0-day exploits to allow propagation to other companies. BRB someone's knocking on the door...

matt3210 3y ago

The on-prem people were right the whole time!

aldousd666 3y ago

This has been a seemingly impassable Rubicon, and Microsoft is building a bridge across it and posting guards along the way.

asddubs 3y ago
I think you're using that metaphor wrong

dirtyid 3y ago

TLDR Microsoft will litigate against any suits until one side goes broke. That side is probably not Microsoft.

elzbardico 3y ago

Maybe it is just me, but I found the quality of copilot suggestions so low , it is generally useable only on the most mundane and repetitive contexts. Why all the enthusiasm about it?