Microsoft offers legal protection for AI copyright infringement challenges – Ars Technica

Thursday Microsoft Announce It will provide legal protection to customers who have been sued for copyright infringement over content generated by the company’s artificial intelligence systems. This new policy, called the Copilot Copyright Commitment, is an expansion of Microsoft’s existing intellectual property damages coverage, Reuters said reports.

Microsoft’s announcement comes as artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT have raised concerns about reproducing copyrighted material without proper attribution. Microsoft has invested heavily in artificial intelligence through products such as Github copilot And Bing Chat, which can generate native code, text, and images on demand. Its AI models gained these capabilities by scraping publicly available data from the Internet without explicit permission from copyright holders.

By providing legal protection, Microsoft aims to give customers confidence in deploying its AI systems without worrying about potential copyright issues. The policy covers damages and legal fees, providing customers with an additional layer of protection as generative AI sees rapid adoption across the technology industry.

“As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they produce without worrying about copyright claims, we provide a clear answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will be held accountable for potential Legal risks involved,” Microsoft writes.

Under the new commitment, Microsoft will pay any legal damages to customers who use Copilot, Bing Chat, and other AI services as long as they use built-in guardrails.

“Specifically, if a third party files a lawsuit against a business customer for copyright infringement for its use of Microsoft Assistants or the output they produce, 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 writes to Microsoft: We used guardrails and content filters that we built into our products.”

With the advent of generative AI, the technology industry has been grappling with questions about properly certifying or licensing copyrighted source materials used to train AI models. Legal experts say these thorny copyright issues are likely to be decided through future legislation and court cases, some of which are already underway.

In fact, Microsoft has already sparked lawsuits over its Copilot technology. Last November, the law firm of Joseph Savery A class action lawsuit was filed v. Microsoft and OpenAI over GitHub Copilot’s alleged copyright infringements that arose from its deletion of publicly available code repositories. Currently, the status of this lawsuit is unknown, and Ars Technica was unable to confirm whether the case is still active using public records.