2023-09-11 10:22:00
The legal departments of American tech giant Microsoft will have their work cut out for them. On September 7, its CEO Brad Smith announced that the company would fully cover customers of its paid generative artificial intelligence tools if they were to be sued for intellectual property violation in this context.
Entitled Copilot Commitment, named following the AI assistant added to the Office 365 office suite, this promise aims to reassure those most concerned regarding the content generation potential of AI tools and the propensity of the latter to use content initially subject to copyright. This legal novelty will concern Copilot 365, GitHub Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise.
“Our problem”
“We will take responsibility for potential legal risks”, says the company. Brad Smith specifies that the financial support will concern both the costs of the judgment as well as, in the event of his clients’ defeat, possible settlements at the end of the trial.
An operation that Microsoft considers fair given the relative lack of maturity of generative AI and the fact that its consumers pay for a service capable of sending them to court. “We charge our commercial customers for our Copilots and, if their use causes legal problems, we should make that our problem rather than our customers’ problem.”, Brad Smith said in a statement. Adobe committed to doing the same three months earlier.
Wishing to avoid too many and too costly lawsuits, Microsoft says it has incorporated filters and technologies into its AI tools. “designed to reduce the likelihood that Copilots will return illegal content”. The Redmond firm also invites its customers to carefully read and respect the rules of use that it has established. Otherwise, they would not be eligible for the Copilot Commitment program, in the same way as non-professional users of its artificial intelligence solutions.
Microsoft already targeted by a complaint
While more and more individuals, particularly artists, complain regarding seeing their content sucked up and then regurgitated by ever more numerous and efficient generative AI tools, all without consent, credit or remuneration, Microsoft wishes to take action address these concerns. Brad Smith thus assures that he is “sensitive to the concerns of the authors” while promising to defend its clients once morest these same authors if they were to attack them to obtain compensation.
It must be said that Microsoft’s lawyers are familiar with intellectual property violation cases in the context of generative artificial intelligence. The company, as well as its subsidiary GitHub and its partner OpenAI, will soon have to answer in court on this specific subject. Since last November, the three entities have been targeted by a class action procedure led by developers who accuse them of having taught their common GitHub Copilot tool to reproduce licensed code without crediting the authors.
Selected for you
1694428113
#Microsoft #cover #customers #event #lawsuit #intellectual #property #infringement
