Microsoft has extended its intellectual property indemnification coverage to include copyright claims related to the use of its AI-powered assistants named Copilots and Bing Chat Enterprise. This extension is called the Copilot Copyright Commitment and aims to provide additional protection to users of these services.
Microsoft has introduced the Copilot Copyright Commitment in response to customer concerns. The commitment aims to ease worries about copyright claims when using Copilot services and their output.
“This new commitment extends our existing intellectual property indemnity support to commercial Copilot services and builds on our previous AI Customer Commitments. Specifically, 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” said company.
However, there’s a catch: to qualify for this protection, customers must use the “guardrails and content filters” within their products. Generative AI programs, capable of creating text, images, sounds, and other data, have raised concerns over their ability to create content without referencing original authors.
“Microsoft is bullish on the benefits of AI, but, as with any powerful technology, we’re clear-eyed about the challenges and risks associated with it, including protecting creative works,” said Microsoft.
Several lawsuits have been filed against Microsoft over their use of Copilot by authors and visual artists for unauthorized use of their work to train generative models.
