Toole

Check our news chanels!

Dołącz do naszego newslettera!

Blog

FEATURED

Microsoft’s AI boss thinks it’s perfectly okay to steal content if it’s on the open web

Mustafa Suleyman has a curious understanding of copyright law on the web.

Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

I think that with respect to content that’s already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the ‘90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been “freeware,” if you like, that’s been the understanding.

Microsoft is currently the target of multiple lawsuits alleging that it — and OpenAI — are stealing copyrighted online stories to train generative AI models, so it may not surprise you to hear a Microsoft exec defend it as perfectly legal. I just didn’t expect him to be so very publicly and obviously wrong!

I am not a lawyer, but even I can tell you that the moment you create a work, it’s automatically protected by copyright in the US. You don’t even need to apply for it, and you certainly don’t void your rights just by publishing it on the web. In fact, it’s so difficult to waive your rights that lawyers had to come up with special web licenses to help!

Fair use, meanwhile, is not granted by a “social contract” — it’s granted by a court. It’s a legal defense that allows some uses of copyrighted material once that court weighs what you’re copying, why, how much, and whether it’ll harm the copyright owner.

That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.

Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:

What are we, collectively, as an organism of humans, other than a knowledge and intellectual production engine?

Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content. He says:

There’s a separate category where a website, or a publisher, or a news organization had explicitly said ‘do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find this content.’ That’s a grey area, and I think it’s going to work its way through the courts.

But robots.txt is not a legal document. It, not fair use, is the social contract that’s been with us since the ‘90s — and yet some AI companies appear to be ignoring it, too. Microsoft partner OpenAI is reportedly among those ignoring it.

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.

Join our AI & tools

news weekly newsletter!

    Latest Posts

    News 1 (Apps)

    TECH OpenAI sends internal memo releasing former employees from controversial exit agreements

    OpenAI on Thursday backtracked on a controversial decision to, in effect, make former employees choose between signing a non-disparagement agreement that would never expire, or keeping their vested equity in the company.

    Chris
    May 23, 2024

    News 2 (Products)

    Google's AI Feature Suggested Using Glue to Keep Cheese on a Pizza

    The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched "cheese not sticking to pizza."

    Chris
    May 23, 2024

    News 3 (Tutorial)

    Meta Creates Group to Advise on AI Products

    The Meta Advisory Group is composed of outside advisors that Meta's management team will periodically consult with on strategic opportunities related to our technology and product roadmap.

    Chris
    May 22, 2024

    News 1 (Apps)

    A new way to generate basketball analytics through tracking with computer vision and AI

    In honor of the playoffs, I’d like to showcase what we’ve been working on here at Nexavision — a new way to generate basketball analytics through tracking with computer vision and AI:

    Chris
    May 23, 2024

    News 2 (Products)

    Amazon plans to give Alexa an AI overhaul — and a monthly subscription price

    Amazon is planning to unveil a souped-up version of its decade-old voice assistant this year and will charge a monthly fee, sources say.

    Chris
    May 23, 2024

    News 3 (Tutorial)

    Adobe brings Firefly AI-powered Generative Remove to Lightroom

    Adobe announced on Tuesday the addition of a Generative Remove feature for Lightroom. Built atop Firefly, the GenAI feature makes it possible to seamlessly edit objects out of photos. The feature arrives on Tuesday as early access.

    Chris
    May 22, 2024

    News 4 (Apps)

    Humane is looking for a buyer after the AI Pin’s underwhelming debut

    The startup apparently thinks it’s worth between $750 million and $1 billion despite the deep software flaws and hardware issues of its first product.

    Chris
    May 22, 2024

    News 5 (Products)

    Meta introduces Chameleon, a state-of-the-art multimodal model

    The architecture of Chameleon can unlock new AI applications that require a deep understanding of both visual and textual information.

    Chris
    May 22, 2024

    News 6 (Tutorial)

    In Seoul summit, heads of states and companies commit to AI safety

    Government officials and AI industry executives agreed on Tuesday to apply elementary safety measures in the fast-moving field and establish an international safety research network.

    Chris
    May 22, 2024
    pl_PLPolish