Microsoft’s Copilot Copyright Commitment

To encourage customers continue buying and using their Generative AI-based products, Microsoft is offering legal protection for AI copyright infringement challenges:  https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2023/09/07/copilot-copyright-commitment-ai-legal-concerns/

Microsoft says “if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output they generate, we will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements that result from the lawsuit, as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products.”

Microsoft is already one of the few companies that has the resources (e.g. computing power) to train Generative AI on the enormous dataset it relies on. But Microsoft is also one of the few companies that has the financial liquidity to settle all the potential lawsuits that comes with its product. In other words, they have so much money, they can potentially uproot the disincentive nature of existing copyright laws. That’s something to chew on!