Last week, Microsoft announced the Copilot Copyright Commitment, which aims to protect Copilot customers from claims of copyright infringement.
If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement based on the use of Microsoft Copilot or the results generated thereby, Microsoft will defend the customer and pay all damages and legal costs.
Microsoft wrote in a statement: “To customers’ questions about whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the results they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we provide a simple answer: Yes, you can, and if so.” If we take action against it for copyright reasons, we assume responsibility for possible legal risks. »
The insurance coverage applies to the Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise services. It includes Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and GitHub Copilot.
Copyright concerns about the use of generative AI results are understandable, as authors and artists question the use of their works to train AI models, the company said.
But since late last year, Microsoft has also been embroiled in a copyright lawsuit against Copilot, accusing the company, its software development platform GitHub and its partner OpenAI of leaking public code for training OpenAI’s Codex machine learning model and Copilot’s programming assistant GitHub to collect.
The companies said at the time that the lawsuit did not identify the copyrighted works they had misused and that the copyright claims “violated the fair use doctrine,” which allows unlicensed use of copyrighted works in certain situations.
However, in this new commitment, Microsoft addressed authors’ concerns, adding that “even where applicable copyright law is clear, generative AI raises new public policy issues” and that it is “essential that authors have control keep it in mind.” exercise their copyright rights and obtain a good return on their creations.
The company also said it has integrated filters and other technologies designed to reduce the likelihood of Copilot returning infringing content. Customers must use content protection and filters to benefit from compensation coverage.
A customer also cannot contribute to a Copilot service if they do not have the appropriate usage rights, Microsoft said.
This commitment, the company emphasized, does not change Microsoft’s position that the company does not claim intellectual property rights in the results of its Copilot services.
The original article is available on IT World Canada, a sister publication of Direction IT.
Adaptation and French translation by Renaud Larue-Langlois.