Microsoft Promises Copyright Protection for Copilot Customers

Microsoft has promised Copilot customers legal protections around copyright.

As questions over the legal risks of how AI parses copyright-protected IP continues to grow, the Copilot Copyright Commitment intends to assuage concerns around IP infringement among those planning to sign up for Microsoft’s AI-powered productivity tool.

“As customers ask whether they can use Microsoft’s Copilot services and the output they generate without worrying about copyright claims, we are providing a straightforward answer: yes, you can, and if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved,” Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, and Hossein Nowbar, CVP and Chief Legal Officer, wrote in an accompanying blog post.

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.”

Microsoft said that the Copilot Copyright Commitment marks an extension of its overall AI customer commitments, announced in June as the tech giant built towards the release of several significant AI solutions, including Copilot and Bing Chat standard and its Enterprise version.

GitHub Copilot is also included, which Smith and Nowbar said “enables developers to spend less time on rote coding, and more time on creating wholly new and transformative outputs”.

Authors and creators, such as the comedian Sarah Silverman, have filed lawsuits against Meta and OpenAI for copyright infringement, incidents which have catalysed a broader conversation around AI’s relationship to copyright.

Copilot Copyright Commitment aims to address the current ambiguity of copyright law around AI and customers’ hesitation around integrating Copilot (and generative AI in general) into their collective workflows because of the potential legal ramifications.

Why is Microsoft Offering These Protections?

Smith and Nowbar expressed three reasons the company provides this legal framework.

First, it “believes in standing behind our customers when they use our products”. If Microsoft charges its customers for Copilot, and its usage creates legal issues for those customers, it is only responsible to assume legal responsibility.

Secondly, Microsoft sympathises with the arguments of copyright holders. “It is critical for authors to retain control of their rights under copyright law and earn a healthy return on their creations,” Smith and Nowbar wrote, “and we should ensure that the content needed to train and ground AI models is not locked up in the hands of one or a few companies in ways that would stifle competition and innovation.”

Lastly, Microsoft argues it has built comprehensive guardrails into Copilot against infringing on authors’ copyrights. Smith and Nowbar explained that Microsoft has introduced “filters and other technologies” designed to minimise the risk of Copilot infringing on content. These complement Microsoft’s established system of guardrails, comprising “classifiers, metaprompts, content filtering, and operational monitoring and abuse detection, including that which potentially infringes third-party content”.

What is the Copilot State of Play Going Into Autumn?

Copilot will be implemented across the full Microsoft 365 suite, including Word, Excel, Power, Outlook, and Teams. From smart Teams meeting recaps to drafting Outlook emails with diverse tones, its exhaustive (and growing) list of productivity-improving features is an increasingly attractive product that could revolutionise how many businesses and industries work.

Microsoft recently shuttered Windows support for Cortana support, emphasising its commitment to adding more powerful AI-powered productivity tools across its suites, with Copilot and Bing Chat Enterprise at the epicentre.

However, Copilot’s newly announced pricing at this year’s Inspire also stirred controversy. Copilot will cost $30 per user per month and will be available for users with Microsoft 365 E3, E5, Business Standard and Business Premium users when it becomes generally available.

The introduction of Copilot would almost double the cost for Microsoft E3 subscribers. For E3, Microsoft currently charges businesses $36 per user per month, including Office apps, Teams, SharePoint, and OneDrive. Microsoft 365 Business Standard customers now pay $12.50 per user per month, almost a third of the extra Copilot expense.

Likewise, the lack of a firm general availability date for Copilot is prompting uncertainty for Microsoft’s partners.

Tom Arbuthnot, Microsoft Teams Expert and Co-founder of Empowering.Cloud, spoke to UC Today earlier last month about the difficult position this puts partners in attempting to sell the product to their customers.

“This is the funny thing,” Arbuthnot said. “The stock price bumped, everybody’s hyped, and the whole Inspire conference was, ‘Partners get ready to sell this stuff,’ but there’s still no GA date(…) the partners have got to make money, and there’s only so much preparation you can do. I think it’ll be interesting to see how the partners equip themselves to do big prep projects and how customers react to that as well.”