Microsoft tells customers it will assume legal responsibility if they are sued for copyright infringement while using the company’s AI Copilot services.
In a blog post about an initiative called Copilot Copyright Commitment, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s chief legal officer, said the company will take on the potential legal risks as more and more copyright holders question how AI companies are handling protected works. Microsoft said the policy is an extension of its general AI customer commitments, which were announced earlier this year.
Microsoft said it chose this path for three reasons: it wants to stand behind its customers when using its services; it understands the concerns of copyright holders; and it has built guardrails against the possibility of results infringing copyrighted material.
“If a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement due to the use of Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgment or settlement resulting from the lawsuit, as long as the customer understands the guardrails and content filters,” Smith wrote.
Smith said one reason for the partnership was to address uncertainty in copyright law without driving people away from generative AI services. “It is critical for authors to maintain control of their rights under copyright law and earn a healthy return on their creations,” Smith wrote, but “we must ensure that the content needed to build AI models training and grounding does not stay in the hands. of one or a few companies in a way that would stifle competition and innovation.” Some companies have floated the idea of granting licenses and opt-in rights as a way for AI projects to access data and not infringe intellectual property rights.
Microsoft launched a suite of generative AI services called Copilot, which has since been integrated into many Microsoft products. Starting with GitHub Copilot in June 2022, which allows people to write code, Copilot is now available in Windows 11, the Edge browser, Teams, Outlook, and other business offerings from Microsoft. It covers services like Bing Chat Enterprise, but as Microsoft’s blog post suggests, non-commercial users of services like the free, AI-powered Bing couldn’t turn to the company for legal defense.
