Microsoft's Copilot Copyright Commitment indemnifies commercial customers for copyright claims over output, not patent claims

Microsoft, "Microsoft announces new Copilot Copyright Commitment for customers," Microsoft On the Issues, blogs.microsoft.com (Sept. 7, 2023) (Brad Smith, Vice Chair and President, and Hossein Nowbar, Chief Legal Officer)

Microsoft announced a Copilot Copyright Commitment covering paid versions of its commercial Copilot services and Bing Chat Enterprise, naming Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot as examples. The announcement states that if a third party sues a commercial customer for copyright infringement for using the Copilots or the output they generate, Microsoft will defend the customer and pay the amount of any adverse judgments or settlements, "as long as the customer used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products." Microsoft gives three reasons: it charges for the Copilots and should bear the legal problem if their use creates one; authors' concerns about generative artificial intelligence are its responsibility to address; and the products contain filters and other technologies intended to reduce the likelihood of infringing output. The post describes the program as extending "our existing intellectual property indemnity support to commercial Copilot services," recalls that Microsoft has defended customers against patent claims relating to its products for roughly two decades, and repeats Microsoft's position that it claims no intellectual property rights in the outputs of its Copilot services. The conditions are that customers use the content filters and other safety systems built into the product and do not attempt to generate infringing materials, including by supplying input they do not have appropriate rights to use.

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