Microsoft promises to protect Copilot customers from copyright infringement claims | Information trend

Last week, Microsoft announced the Copilot Copyright Commitment, which aims to protect Copilot customers from copyright infringement claims.

If a third party files a lawsuit against a commercial customer for copyright infringement due to use of Microsoft Copilot or the results it produces, Microsoft will legally defend the customer and bear all damages and legal costs.

“As customers wonder whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the results they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we offer a simple answer: Yes, you can, and if they are challenged on copyright grounds, we will hold them accountable,” Microsoft wrote in a statement. the responsibility”. For potential legal risks. »

Coverage applies to Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise services. Includes Microsoft 365 Copilot for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as GitHub Copilot.

The company said that copyright concerns over the use of generative AI results are understandable as authors and artists question the use of their works to train AI models.

But since late last year, Microsoft has also been embroiled in a lawsuit over Copilot’s copyright, accusing the company, software development platform GitHub, and its partner OpenAI of collecting public code to train OpenAI’s Codex machine learning model and GitHub’s Copilot programming assistant.

The companies said at the time that the lawsuit did not specify which copyrighted works they had misused and that the copyright claims “contrary to the fair use doctrine,” which allows unauthorized use of copyrighted works in certain situations.

However, with this new commitment, Microsoft said it is sensitive to authors’ concerns, adding that “even where existing copyright law is clear, generative AI raises new public policy questions.” It is “essential for authors to maintain control” of their rights under copyright law and receive 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 protections and filters to benefit from compensation coverage.

A customer also cannot make contributions to the Copilot service if they do not have the appropriate usage rights, Microsoft said.

The company stressed that this commitment does not change Microsoft’s position that it does not claim any intellectual property rights over the results of its Copilot services.

The original article (in English) is available at The world of information technology Canadasister publication to Information trend.

French adaptation and translation by Renaud Larue-Langlois.