Microsoft has announced its intention to provide some legal guarantees to its customers who use the company’s products based on artificial intelligence.
Last week, the tech giant announced the launch of the Copilot Copyright Commitment program. As part of this solution, which has legal content, consumers of Microsoft products with artificial intelligence will receive protection in the event of situations and proceedings requiring mechanisms to protect intellectual property rights in violation of relevant norms.
The company’s president, Brad Smith, said that customers often wonder whether they can use Microsoft Copilot services and at the same time not be at risk of copyright claims. By launching a new program, the technology giant gave an answer about the acceptability of this practice. Brad Smith stated that in the event that a user faces a claim based on copyright, the company will take responsibility for the potentially possible legal consequences of these proceedings.
The head of Microsoft also noted that the new program provides for the expansion of the obligations of the technology giant in comparison with the existing practice of customer support in the area of intellectual property protection. Separately, he stressed that the innovations concerning the degree of responsibility of the firm in the proceedings are based on current duties.
Brad Smith stated that in the event that a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using Microsoft’s Copilots or the output generated by this service, the company will protect the client and will bear any costs associated with adverse court decisions or settlements, and costs due to the circumstances of the lawsuit. At the same time, the technology giant has provided a prerequisite for receiving support, which is that the consumer must use the guardrails and content filters created by the company.
The firm announced the launch of the new program almost a month after a federal judge ruled that it was impossible to extend the validity of copyright laws to works of art generated by artificial intelligence-based tools.
The decision by U.S. District Court Judge Beryl A. Howell is the result of a case in which Stephen Thaler sued the United States Copyright Office after the government refused to protect the rights to one of the images created by his AI model. Mr. Thaler tried several times to protect copyrights and last year appealed to the court after finally refusing to satisfy claims in a different plane of relations. In the lawsuit, he claimed that the Management’s decision was arbitrary, capricious, and did not comply with the law.
Beryl A. Howell stated that the copyright never extended to works in which, according to her, there was no guiding human hand. She also replied that the fundamental requirement for the start of legal mechanisms in this case is the authorship of a person.
A number of other AI-related court cases have also been considered this year. For example, a group of writers accused OpenAI of teaching its chatbot ChatGPT, including, on the basis of copyrighted works.
As we have reported earlier, Microsoft Gives Out Free Cybersecurity Tools.
