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This is a pipe dream. There's too much money behind strictly enforcing copyright protections on commercial products. If anything gets killed, it's going to be automatic copyright protection for "little guys". Microsoft will be able to copy your publicly shared code/art/images willy-nilly but will still send their compliance officers to check that your company has a valid Office 365 license if they notice you writing a private letter in Word.

Edit: If you doubt this, notice that co-pilot was trained on public, open-source code on Github. Not on Microsoft's/Github's own proprietary code. If co-pilot is truly so transformative that copyright doesn't apply, why not feed it all of Microsoft's code to train it better?




> If you doubt this, notice that co-pilot was trained on public, open-source code on Github. Not on Microsoft's/Github's own proprietary code. If co-pilot is truly so transformative that copyright doesn't apply, why not feed it all of Microsoft's code to train it better?

I hear this argument a lot but I think the answer is actually pretty mundane: the model behind Copilot was trained by OpenAI, not Microsoft. Microsoft has a large investment in OpenAI, but they don't own the company, and AFAICT OpenAI did all of the scraping for Copilot on their own, without any special access to MS code.


>If you doubt this, notice that co-pilot was trained on public, open-source code on Github. Not on Microsoft's/Github's own proprietary code. If co-pilot is truly so transformative that copyright doesn't apply, why not feed it all of Microsoft's code to train it better?

Presumably because there might be trade secrets in there that they don't want to leak. That seems entirely separate to copywrite to me.


I am sure they have an in-house model trained on all their code. It would be immensely more useful than a generic model.




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