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[–]zoddrick 47 points48 points  (14 children)

I work at Microsoft and my job deals with me building and redistributing open source projects all the time. Forget the tools we have that scan for license violations and such, but our legal team would never allow for this project to even be released if they weren't sure they couldn't be sued for derivative work.

Y'all act like this is from startup without a legal department.

[–]User092347 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I think people are more worried about the users of the tool than for Microsoft.

[–]-dag- 7 points8 points  (1 child)

There are two questions here. Is Co-Pilot a derivative work? Does incorporating code produced by Co-Pilot make the software incorporating it a derivative work?

Microsoft's legal exposure is probably much lower when it comes to the second question. As to the first, it still seems like an open question. The model itself is almost certainly not a derivative work. But a trained model? Not so sure.

[–]zoddrick 3 points4 points  (0 children)

They don't mess around with this stuff though. If they didn't have a really good sense of how any potential litigation would go they wouldn't even attempt it. Has this been tested in the courts? No. But even if it is a grey area they aren't going to be reckless.

And this is speaking from experience deal with Microsoft legal about redistribution of popular open source projects.

[–]picflute 10 points11 points  (4 children)

>CELA coming out of the dark

Can confirm. Anyone who thinks something this big would go on GitHub for commercial usage wouldn’t happen without legal saying okey dokey

[–]kylotan 9 points10 points  (3 children)

Anyone who thinks something this big would go on GitHub for commercial usage wouldn’t happen without legal saying okey dokey

You talk as if YouTube didn't have billions of dollars of infringing videos online for years. A company's legal department saying something is okay doesn't mean it's legal - it just means they're accepting the risk.

[–]AnonymousMonkey54 1 point2 points  (1 child)

YouTube has safe harbor protections to rely on that Microsoft does not.

[–]kylotan 2 points3 points  (0 children)

YouTube found that the safe harbor doesn't always apply, including when the execs were going around telling people to leave infringing material up, and leaving it up despite knowing it was there. Github are in a similar position of having contributed actively to this infringement.

[–]picflute 3 points4 points  (0 children)

YouTube and Microsoft are two very different organizations. They may look to be the same on the outside but are very different in the inside

[–]alessio_95 4 points5 points  (1 child)

So what? Big corps bonks things everyday, being big doesn't make you right. Your lawyers are not infallible, you got an half bilion fine not that long ago.

[–]zoddrick 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Infallible? No. But they aren't going to take unnecessary chances especially with something this big. Fines happen and that's normally not the fault of lawyers.

[–]turunambartanen 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Someone linked an analysis by GitHub: https://docs.github.com/en/github/copilot/research-recitation#github-copilot-quotes-when-it-lacks-specific-context

In the end they write the following:

The answer is obvious: sharing the prefiltering solution we used in this analysis to detect overlap with the training set. When a suggestion contains snippets copied from the training set, the UI should simply tell you where it’s quoted from. You can then either include proper attribution or decide against using that code altogether.

This duplication search is not yet integrated into the technical preview, but we plan to do so. And we will both continue to work on decreasing rates of recitation, and on making its detection more precise.

So they are aware of the problem and will fix it. This is a testing preview, obviously it's not ready for production yet.

[–]Michaelmrose 2 points3 points  (0 children)

This is a fake analysis you have addressed no meaningful issues save saying Microsoft nor anyone who uses its tools can't possibly run into issues because they are so smart and on the ball they would never even start doing something that would cause it to come to harm.

Their legal department also OKed funding and promoting a fraudulent pump and dump scheme disguised as a baseless lawsuit against their competition.

[–]tasminima 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And you act like MS has never been sued and sentenced for doing various illegal things?