You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?
I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?
(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)
I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.
Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.
I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.
I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.
I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.
And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.
I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.
It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.
Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.
Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
> Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?
Why do you assume that reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code, and that if docs aren't being reviewed it's somehow less likely that code is being reviewed?
There's a formal process for reviewing code because bugs can break things in massive ways. While there may not be the same degree of rigor for reviewing documentation because it's not going to stop the software from working.
But one doesn't necessarily say anything about the other.
Regardless, their point is that the argument seems faulty. Indeed, their docs going unreviewed seems moot to whether the code goes unreviewed, given there are much stronger reasons to review code than there are to review documentation; as they wrote, bad documentation doesn't automatically break your application when it's published (there's at least a few more steps involved). Your statement's accuracy is not exclusive to the illogic of an argument which agrees with the statement.
> I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate
Indeed, that is playing Devil's Advocate but one should remember that such Advocacy is performed to make sure that arguments against the Devil are as strong as they can be. It's not straightforward to see how simply repeating an assertion helps to argue for the veracity of it.
>> I realize BSOD is no longer nearly as common as it once was
Anecdotally, installing wrong drivers (in my case it was drivers for COM-port STM32 interaction) could make it as common as twice a day on Win11.
While my windows server 2008 still doing just great, no BSOD through lifetime.
I agree that for a common user BSOD is now less likely to happen, but wonder whether it's less to do with windows core, and more with windows defender default aggressive settings
At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).
Likely it wouldn't get written at all. The most useful aspect of layered approval processes is people treat them like outright bans and don't blog at all unless it's part of the job description.
If they have the documentation... With Microsoft probably the answer to that is yes, but more often than not documentation is simply absent. And in cases like this not being too aware of where the lines are is probably a great way to advance your career.
Reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code because it's a lower bar than reviewing code.
I have never even heard of a software company that acts otherwise (except IBM, and much of the world of Silicon Valley software engineering is reactionary to IBM's glacial pace).
I'm not saying docs == code for importance is a bad way to be, just that if you can name firms that treat them that way other than IBM (or aerospace), I'd be interested to learn more.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, maybe my use of "lower bar" was ambiguous, and I realize now it has a dual meaning.
What I'm saying is, you have to review code to get it out the door with a certain degree of quality. That's your core product. That's the minimum standard you have to pass, the lowest bar.
In contrast, reviewing documentation is usually less core. You do that after the code gets reviewed. If there's time. If it doesn't get done, that's not necessarily saying anything about code quality.
Even if it's easier to review documentation, that doesn't mean it's getting prioritized. So it's not a lower bar in the sense that lower bars get climbed first.
Whilst I understand it shows a break down somewhere, it a bit of a stretch to extend that idea across their entire codebase.
Organizations are large, so much so that different levels of rigor across different parts of the organization. Furthermore, more rigorous controls would be applied to code than for documentation (you would assume).
Yea, I have a post up there from a couple decades ago (maybe? I haven't looked, I don't know if they keep stuff up forever) and I guarantee you my code went through more review than that post did.
On the contrary, getting away with breaking the law is most of the innovation in the past decade. Look at Uber and AirBNB, and cryptocurrency, and every AI company.
The chrome browser and the v8 engine are innovations. The Go language is an innovation. Pet cameras, simple as they are, are an innovation.
Uber is a rebadged taxi service with seedier people than before.
AirBnB is a less disguised but still rebadged B&B service with seedier people than before.
Charlie Munger said it best. Cryptocurrency is like seeing a bunch of people trading turds and saying to yourself "well.. I don't want to miss out!" The seediest of all people.
AI doesn't even really exist by any common definition. They have supremely weak and power hungry language models trained on terabytes of stolen data and reddit conversations.
Hell, watching a guy hammer himself in his own nuts on youtube is an innovation, and I think I'm going to go do /that/ now instead of being depressed. Watching "ow my balls" and baitin'. What's left?
Bitcoin and shitcoin holders being among "the seediest of all people" while the Western oligarchy mailed each other the most vile things that probably happened iRL leaves a bitter taste. Don't know if you really thought this through.
If you're into cryptocurrency you should have /some/ pause over the fact that child pornographers, drug dealers and murderers all share your love of the technology. I'm sure that's just coincidence.
Yeah, I recently stumbled on some other devblogs post very similar in quality to the one that was linked here, which was basically wholesale plagiarism of a stackoverflow answer. I found it while searching for an error message.
The real cherry on top, is that the Microsoft link from the blog post by the Microsoft senior product manager goes to a Kaggle dataset page claiming the dataset is CC0: Public Domain.
Wow, that is a great catch. I looked at the Kaggle page. It has been up for two years. From the hamburger menu (top right), I tried: Report Dataset. When I click the button "Report illegal content", I am redirected to a Google page (huh?): https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?prod...
When I try to fill the questionaire, my request is rejected with this message:
We understand that you are not legally authorized to file a copyright complaint on behalf of the copyright owner.
In accordance with applicable copyright laws, we only accept copyright complaints from copyright owners or their authorized representatives. If you have legal questions about copyright law, please consult your own legal counsel.
We are sorry we cannot assist you further.
Hysterical. What a farce. That data set is pure theft.
> it seems linking to a copy that claims the dataset is public domain, would be problematic copyright-wise.
Would it? Sounds to me like the blame lies on the person uploading the dataset under that license, unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'
> unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'
Yes there's an expectation that you put in some minimum amount of effort. The license issue here is not subtle, the Kaggle page says they just downloaded the eBooks and converted them to txt. The author is clearly familiar enough with HP to know that it's not old enough to be public domain, and the Kaggle page makes it pretty clear that they didn't get some kind of special permission.
If you want to get more specific on the legal side then copyright infringement does not require that you _knew_ you were infringing on the copyright, it's still infringement either way and you can be made to pay damages. It's entirely on you to verify the license.
I'm not a copyright expert and if you told me that Harry Potter was common domain then I'd probably be a bit surprised but wouldn't think it's crazy. The first book came out 30 years ago after all. On further research the copyright laws are way more aggressive than that (a bit too much if you ask me) but 30 years doesn't seem quick. Patents expire after 20 years.
I find this fascinating, as I keep observing that there are pretty widespread differences between what people believe copyright does and what the law actually says.
The Berne Convention (author's life + 50 years) is the baseline for the copyright laws in most countries. Many countries have a longer copyright period than Berne.
I think even people who don't care about how broken the copyright system is understand intuitively that huge commercial properties that are contemporaneous with themselves are protected. They don't need to know any details to know that these properties belong to massive companies and aren't free for the taking.
How many people think they can rip off Disney characters even if they don't know how much Disney lobbied to extend their ownership? People can observe that no one but Disney gets to use them and understand, even if not consciously, that those are Disney's to use.
^ Probably poorly written without time to proof cause time constraint.
It is a media franchise for children, and there are many elements, and trademarks in addition to copyrights. I think most fans understand the bright line that stops them copying an entire book or film work, unless their dad has a Roku at home.
But there are over 34,000 images uploaded to the Fandom.com site alone. There are character bios and generous quotes from films and books. Countless fans are using elements in memes and avatars and social media posts.
Fan-fiction abounds, where the characters and scenarios are endlessly remixed and mashed up with other fandoms.
Quidditch... simulated... is a collegiate sport, but they had to rename it.
Even on the official Wizarding World site, you can make custom downloadable stuff. Not long ago, freely download wallpapers. Get free clips and trailers on any video site.
News outlets had a difficult time explaining the "Public Domain" status of Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop with the new years. Because Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, the characters, aren't the things which are copyrighted, and the characters' status didn't change with the new year.
I would bet that the typefaces in the official books have their own copyrights, and the book binding processes are patented.
The article author and the uploader should _BOTH_ be sentient enough to engage brain and not just ignore it because they feel "it's an abstract concept I'd not get in trouble for when not working in the US or EU".
Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort in the US. Willful infringement can result in harsher penalties, but being mistaken about the copyright status is not a valid defense.
I don't know if you're trying to say that, in the realm of tort law, it is only strict liability, or if you are saying that copyright infringement is only a tort. If it's the latter, it's completely untrue, as there are criminal copyright infringement statutes.
most likely, there seems there are plenty of devs from nearly all major tech companies on HN, they often don't chime in as much anymore when it comes to problems, I've wondered if they get some kind of guidance on not commenting on "problems".
The general guidance is likely what I was told when I worked at Apple: essentially, as an employee, people will read what you write as though you are repenting Apple whether you are or are not.
So in short, I kept my mouth shut. I assumed I would lose my job if my public comment reached the right people.
To this day, even retired, I send bug reports to co-workers I know that are still at Apple. (I've sent a few image files that were problematic to the top engineer on the ImageIO team for example. I worked with him for over two decades before I retired.)
Apple is a very different place than it was when I started in 1995. Over the decades since I started, I have seen numerous changes I dislike. Sadly many of the changes were seen across the whole industry though so I would be no better off anywhere else.
I'm happy to have retired though. The industry lost a lot of what used to be fun.
Half the point of "AI" is to squeeze the labor market. This is why you don't see people chiming in. It's a nearly fully corrupt and monopolized system.
Azure and felt overwhelmed? As a student or first- time user to cloud computing, I've been there too. The idea of creating a chatbot or search app using GPT sounds exciting, but the process of setting up everything right from the vector database, provisioning OpenAl models, to integrating them,
Feel free to create an alternative. Keep in mind it's completely illegal and you will get the book thrown at you if you are caught. You will also end up using your captcha page to DDOS people who are trying to unmask you.
It doesnt offer a guide to piracy, it offers a guide on including specific data from a dataset into SQL so it can be referenced by an LLM.
If anything Kaggle would be on the hook for including the data as CC0. Or perhaps to Shubham Maindola for uploading it. In fact the "provenance" listed would give me chills. Crazy how this got a 10.0 score. "I downloaded the ebooks of Harry Potter. Then converted them to txt files."
My best guess is that it flew under the radar. The Kaggle dataset has 'only' 10,000 downloads, and the article itself probably doesn't have that many views. Still, this seems pretty far beyond the pale. Given the other case of AI-related plagiarism by Microsoft that was on the front page[1], it seems whatever review process they have for content that is published by their employees, if there is any review process at all, is deeply flawed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057829, "Microsoft morged my diagram". It was in a discussion there that someone pointed out this article linking to full downloads of the Harry Potter novels, which I thought deserved more visibility.
Also, I imagine that most of those 10k downloads are probably from AI trainers that are just speed running through Kaggle to obtain absolutely anything to train their AI. There are definitely other, more 'known' ways to obtain these books without finding them as random text files in an AI dataset operation
It rubs me the wrong way that corporations get a free pass on copyright infrigement, while the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught. I think this, together with the morging plagiarism, also indicates a pattern of behaviour from Microsoft that should be reformed. I would prefer if Microsoft were not able to produce AI slop degradations of other people's work and claim it as their own.
I refrained from replying to this until now because I felt this thread was excessively pedantic, but Aaron Swartz is in fact one of the cases I had in mind when writing my original comment about "harshly as possible". To say that his case was only "tangentially" copyright-related is whitewashing the copyright lobby of its complicity in his death. It is, in fact, the primary reason he died. The US government was trying to make an example out of him, and stacked every charge they possibly could, because of his act of copyright infringement. Perhaps, with a shallow understanding of the case, you might see the list of felonies he was charged with and come to the conclusion that copyright infringement was only one small part of the case against him. But the copyright infringement was the crux of the case, and the rest of the charges were "throwing the book at him" in the well-defined meaning of the term[1]. His suicide was a direct result of the overzealous prosecution attempting to ruin his life with charges wildly disproportionate to the harm he caused to society (ie. basically none). It is worth noting he had not even shared the material he had downloaded, although the prosecution made a case on asserting that they believed he intended to.
Now, as for "the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught". You are correct in your pedantry that this statement not expressed as rigorously as it possibly could have been. There are different classes of copyright infringement; "receiving" and "perpetuating" being two of them [to avoid further pedantry, I am not asserting this is precise legal terminology but rather a lay distinction for the purposes of discussion]. It is the latter case which is tried as harshly as possible when caught, and there are many such examples other than Swartz, and I think it was clear my intent when I said it despite the fact that I did not write about the distinction at length.
That is not to say the situation around the former type of copyright infringement is so kind, either. While in some countries it is mostly overlooked, which I believe to be the case in the US, in other countries it is more strictly enforced, such being the case in my own country. While "as harshly as possible" isn't accurate to prosecution against infringement of this nature, you can still be disproportionately punished relative to the damage caused when downloading pirated material for personal viewing, if caught (and ISPs/rightsholders do monitor for it to the best of their abilities).
There is also a third class of copyright infringement to consider which is highly disfavourable to individuals: derivative works. Strictly speaking, even as something as simple as drawing fanart of a character or remixing a song is illegal, even if the activity is completely non-commercial in nature. This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. Rightsholders know that copyright law reformation would gain tremendous popular support if they were draconian about enforcing their rights against derivative works, and that allowing fan communities to bloom is actually beneficial to their own IP, so enforcement is highly selective. However, that arbitrary, selective nature of enforcement is itself dangerous to individuals, and is sometimes used to punish specific individuals as harshly as possible at the whims of the IP holder. It is true that not everyone is actually subjected to this, but the threat of it happening looms over everyone who expresses their creativity through derivative works.
None of this sits right with me, especially as corporations are hoovering up every piece of copyrighted material they possibly can and creating commercial derivative-work-machines that mass-produce sloppified derivative works, and are getting a completely free pass by the legal system to do so while individuals are still treated like felons for 'crimes' that are at most marginally harmful, or in the case of the creative production of derivative works, not only not harmful but actually beneficial to society.
That’s plainly ridiculous. If Swartz killed himself over the few months in prison he was facing, the primary reason he died was almost certainly mental illness, and not how the legal system treated him.
Show me one person who has been punished in any way for pirating ole Jo's books.
Shit, I don't even think the people who screamed "Snape killed Dumbledore" at lines for book 6 based on leaked copies that hit before the street date got in any trouble.
>Shit, I don't even think the people who screamed "Snape killed Dumbledore" at lines for book 6 based on leaked copies that hit before the street date got in any trouble.
How could anyone possibly get in trouble for something that isn't a crime?
That’s a question for someone who tattled about Microsoft and moaned about the people punished for book piracy.
Pirating a leaked book before launch and trying to dampen enthusiasm is basically as bad as you can get without actually competing. Even in that extreme case, no one was punished.
Nor should they have been but it sort of makes the moral argument for “Harry Potter shouldn’t be on kaggle” much weaker.
Rowling is among the last persons on earth that need help on this.
But ignoring that: I do not think that these txt files being online do any economic harm. Noone will go and say "hey, I'm going to read these un-formatted text files instead of buying the 30 year old books for little money or pirating proper epubs which are trivial to find". If at all the kaggle dataset is free publicity. So as the author I would leave them online.
Back in the day, text mining for science was mostly ignored, even though it was technically illegal. Authors didn't feel threatened by models for spam detection or sentiment classification. Demanding money from poor academics was pointless (they'd just move on to a different author) and bad PR.
I mean, books3 contained hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, and people released it under their own name.
Disrespecting the copyright on a multi-billion dollar franchise hardly comes close to the major unethical behavior the trillion dollar companies are committing.
I am more worried about lack of any thought that this one might be a bad idea. If the people going through very selective hiring process can't even figure out that publicising article based on copyright theft is bad idea what is going on with actually impactful decisions?
Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.
The bee movie, but every frame was passed through an AI to make it Ghibli style, the audio was turned into a transcript by a transcribing AI and then turned into audio by a TTS AI.
Very low code. Infinite scale. Name a better AI startup to invest.
Robot slaves is a funny phrase if you consider that the origin of the word robot literally is a term that meant slave or "forced work". Language doing circles.
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.
This is pretty common. In Hebrew aved means both "work" and "slavery" and you have the same in Arabic and other semitic languages. In Ancient Egyptian "bak" is used for both "servant" and "worker". The ambiguity in the Hebrew is why many references to this are translated as "servile labor" in the King James, as they were uncertain of the sense of the term meant, or perhaps correctly guessed that both senses were meant. In many ancient languages, e.g. ancient egyptian "worker" and "slave" were synonyms. In modern parlance "slavery" or "servitude" is viewed as an unspeakable evil and people are shocked that there is linguistic overlap with neutral terms like "work" or "labor", which are just ubiquitous parts of life, but historically this is quite common and it is true all around the world, for example in German "knecht" means both "servant" and "farm hand", and in Latin "minister" meant "servant" or "subordinate" (as opposed to "magister"), just like in english you have "server", "serve", "servant", "servile". In Sanskrit "dasa" originally meant "foreigner" or "enemy" and then later "slave" but over time it has come to be used as a suffix to denote someone who "serves" a diety voluntarily, e.g. "Ramdas". In Ancient Japanese you have "yakko" for a low status worker or servant, and later that evolved to footmen who carried baggage for samurai.
Wait until you find out what the word 'ciao' meant in the original Italian/Latin: 'ORIGIN: Italian dial. alt. of schiavo (I am your) slave from medieval Latin sclavus slave.'
Well they're not an alternative, so I suppose not. No one is being chained to a desk and made to author reports on how their department is aligning with the new business growth strategy. And the robot slaves aren't being designed to mine precious minerals or attach buttons to clothes.
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright, or not blindly copying anything that is out there.
This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.
This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.
I have hated Microsoft for decades and am somewhat of an extremist when it comes to avoiding their products. That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical. The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.
Their lawyers would argue, and I agree, that they legally don't have to. It is called Fair Use; there is an epidemic of publisher backed groupthink trying to deny its existence.
The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).
I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.
Read Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Microsoft lawyers would, and may have to, argue that their use of Harry Potter without permission is for valid research purposes. You are actively trying to negate Fair Use with your specious argument. That document may have been naive but it certainly isn't a piracy manual.
There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.
Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.
I feel like the title is a bit misleading, unless the person who put all HP books on Kaggle as a (supposedly) CC0-licensed data set did so as a Microsoft employee.
Nevertheless pretty egregious oversight (incompetence?) and something that shouldn't have been published.
Microsoft could have used any dataset for their blog, they could have even chosen to use actual public domain novels. Instead, they opted to use copywritten works that JK hasn't released into the public domain (unless user "Shubham Maindola" is JK's alter ego).
The licensing: If I steal something and tell you its free and yours for the taking, that feels different than a Fence (knowingly) buying stolen goods. It's obviously semantics and there should have been some better judgemend from MS, but downloading a dataset (stated as public domain) from kaggle feels spiritually different from piracy (e.g.: if someone uploads a less known, copyrighted data set to kaggle/huggingface under an incorrect license, are tutorials that use this data set a 'guide to pirating' this data set? To me, that feels like a wrong use of the term)
If it comes from a site claiming it was under a licence when it was not, the misdeed is done by the person who provided the version carrying the licence.
Just because it says "CC0" does not make it CC0. If you upload a dataset you don't have the rights to, any license declaration you make is null and void, and anyone using it as if it had that license is violating copyright
Even if MS could claim that they were acting in good faith there really isn't much legal wiggle room for that. But it doesn't even come to that because I don't think anyone would buy that they really thought that the Harry Potter books were under the CC0
If you buy a pirated book on Amazon you get to keep the book and the pirate printer is the one persecuted.
Same thing applies here.
Up to 80% off all works that are in copyright terms are accidentally in the public domain. A well known example is Night of the Living Dead. It is not your job to check that the copiright on a work you use is the correct one.
Section 116 (2) A plaintiff is not entitled by virtue of this section to any damages or to any other pecuniary remedy, other than costs, if it is established that, at the time of the conversion or detention:
(a) the defendant was not aware, and had no reasonable grounds for suspecting, that copyright subsisted in the work or other subject - matter to which the action relates;
(b) where the articles converted or detained were infringing copies--the defendant believed, and had reasonable grounds for believing, that they were not infringing copies; or
(c) where an article converted or detained was a device used or intended to be used for making articles--the defendant believed, and had reasonable grounds for believing, that the articles so made or intended to be made were not or would not be, as the case may be, infringing copies.
Does this not mean the opposite of your claim? It sounds to me that if you unwittingly bought a dodgy copy of something, the law thinks the copyright owner can get you to pay for a legit copy, but not punish you for your mistake.
In the specific case of the Harry Potter works, the fame might meet the threshold of reasonable grounds for believing, but noosphr's argument that "Up to 80% off all works that are in copyright terms are accidentally in the public domain" could grant a reasonable grounds for believing it is not.
This is one of those things that causes interesting court cases because a reasonable grounds for believing X is not the same thing as not reasonable grounds for believing not X.
Reasonable grounds for suspicion probably carries more weight here than reasonable grounds for the absence of suspicion, but cases have hung on things like this before , like the presence or absence of an Oxford comma.
To clarify: Microsoft linked to a dataset on Kaggle, which is falsely labeled CC0 (Public Domain). It's the fault of the user who uploaded the dataset and misrepresented the licensing.
Multiple failures. One on writer of blog even for a moment considering that such data set would be legal. And next for MS for hiring such a person with that poor judgement. Namely publicly posting about it on company platform. Instead of choosing some other data set.
I don't believe that title conveys the actual significance of the article that makes it worthy of attention, so I hope HN may forgive me for coming up with an alternative title!
I recall the source code for Windows XP was leaked some years ago; not just isolated parts of the code base, like with the earlier Windows NT4/2000 source code leak, but a completely buildable repository.
If I write an article on training an LLM on the leaked Windows XP source code, blithely mark the source code repo as in 'the public domain', but used Azure resources for the how-to steps, would that would make it OK Microsoft? You know, your Azure division might get some money...
Seriously, this is just so...blatant. It's like we've all collectively decided that copyright just doesn't matter anymore. Just readin this article, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
How soon before someone will be able to make an online library which generates the original books using LLMs? Surely popular titles like Harry Potter may end up so well represented in the training that we'll get the full books out of the LLM with a close to 100% accuracy?
This is already possible for Harry Potter specifically. There was a study demonstrating that Sonnet 3.7, among other models tested, could reproduce the first Harry Potter book 95.8% verbatim[1].
...only if you deliberately attempt to extract it by repeatedly prompting it to complete fragments of the book. They had to do quite a bit of work to make this happen.
so? It demonstrates that LLM models retain the copyrighted material in their weights. This is an important thing to consider about LLMs and shows that there need to be better protections for the creative industry.
Really? I retain plenty of copyrighted material in my head. What matters is the contexts in which I reproduce it (if any).
A search index might also contain copyrighted material. As long as it's used for search queries as opposed to regurgitation there's no problem. Search indexes and LLMs are both clearly very beneficial tools to have access to.
What does this (thought) experiment accomplish? That is, what point are you trying to make here?
Since we're talking about an electronic system the search index example is the more directly relevant one. Anyone who wants to object to LLMs is going to need to take care to ensure consistency with his views on Google's search index.
You could do the equivalent if they would let you. They don't. That's the point I was getting at. How the thing is used is what actually matters, not that it has "absorbed" copyrighted material.
I never claimed any change in copyright law. Only that one analogy was more direct than the other for the purpose of the current discussion.
You didn't answer my question. What point were you trying to make with your earlier reply?
Professional performers could certainly be viewed as such in this analogy. They memorize and then reproduce copyrighted material as a matter of course.
And when they do is when copyright protections might come into play. But not the basic learning of being a human being.
My playing copyrighted music on my synths at home, or singing lyrics along are different than if I am a professional musician benefiting financially from playing someone else's music in public.
Producing a product = market rules apply
Just living as a human = totally different thing
Yes, I agree. That was my entire point when I said: What matters is the contexts in which I reproduce it (if any).
The issue is not (or at least should not be) that LLMs are trained on material subject to copyright or can be very intentionally coaxed into regurgitating copyrighted material. The issue should be people building or using systems with the explicit intent of reproducing copyrighted material in an unauthorized manner.
> If an LLM is a product, and it contains the work (in this case can spit out Harry Potter) it is derivative. Doesn't matter what it's used for.
That's not the definition of a derivative work in copyright law; further, whether what legally qualifies as a derivative work is within the scope of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder is, in the US, subject to whether it is within one of the exceptions to exclusive rights in the law, notably the fair use exception, which very much does depend on, among other things, what it is used for.
That's dogma on your part. Rather than practical outcome you're opting for human exceptionalism. I can't accept that.
Merely containing a work doesn't make something derivative. A photograph could inadvertently capture a copyrighted image in the background but so long as it isn't the primary focus I think your line of reasoning there fails.
It is your view that's dogmatic. The law in this area has yet to be fully tested in court, let alone any prospective changes that might be made to it in the near future.
Regardless, I thought this was a discussion about what the law ought to say.
The defense is that the model is not designed to output Harry Potter verbatim, and in fact will not unless you jump through lots of hoops. Image generation would probably provide you with a stronger position here since those setups can easily output likenesses without needing to carefully engineer the prompt to cause them to do so. But even then it is clearly not the intention of the people training or deploying them that they be used that way.
I thought it was exaggerated but reading the archive, yeah that’s something that should not pass even glancing over by public communication person, or even like any manager like senior product manager…
My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
I think Microsoft employees should be smart enough to figure that "a globally beloved collection of seven books" (their words) is probably not free to use.
It is just very hard problem when you are very popular work. Trying to find and track and take down all copies of certain work online is constant fight. Sometimes things just slip especially if they are not that popular.
Something like Harry Potter might be shared every day. And I mean as pirate work distributed as new copy. Staying on top of that will be very hard work.
“Fair use” allows for educational usage of copyrighted material. Technically it probably is not fair use as Microsoft isn’t an educational institution or a nonprofit.
But come on … these guides really are for learning purposes. Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me at all. They aren’t even hosting it, just pointing to kaggle who is hosting it.
On principle copyright law should allow this kind of learning use case anyway.
Github never deletes commits so we just need to find the hash for the latest one before the force push. In the forks you can find ones from before, but they're not up to date. Example: b5c8280d87c501d9ca7f63a6f252ca60ca820a4a for a copy 3 months old
Link: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
the merge commits in those repositories are all digitally signed by GitHub public key, so the previous history is fully authenticated and non-repudiable
so any copies now can be trivially proven to be genuine output by Microslop
hoisted by your own petard
signed merge commit is: 987eee6af61788647ae0cab82ae8a5d9402a5bd0
PGP signature (using GitHub's key: B5690EEEBB952194) is:
So you're saying, it's legal to teach AI using illegally sourced copyrighted material, because it's for educational purposes only - interesting argument... ;)
Intent (should) be what matters. If you want to learn how to train AI and use copyrighted material in your learning - I don’t care in the slightest at all.
In fact if you do this as a nonprofit or at an educational institution in a teaching context it’s explicitly allowed by fair use already.
If you do it individually, idk I’m not a lawyer. But it should be allowed on principle.
But if you then go take your trained AI and deploy it for commercial purposes that’s a different story and should have protections for the original rights holders.
You guys are talking about copyright but I think a bigger takeaway is there is a process breakdown at Microsoft. Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?
I guess the question to leadership is that two of the three pillars , namely security and quality are at odds with the third pillar— AI innovation. Which side do you pick?
(I know you mean well and I love you, Scott Hanselman but please don't answer this yourself. Please pass this on to the leadership.)
I worked at Microsoft for many years and blogged there.
Microsoft was unique among the companies I worked for in that they gave you some guidelines and then let you blog without having to go through some approval or editing process. It made blogging much more personal and organic IMO; company-curated blog posts read like marketing.
I didn’t see the original post but it looks like somebody made a bad judgment call on what to put in a company blog post (and maybe what constitutes ethical activity) and that it was taken down as soon as someone noticed.
I care much less about whether the person exercised good judgment in posting, and don’t care (and am happy) that there was not some process that would have caught it pre-publication.
I care much more if the person works in a team that believes that copyright infringement for AI training is a justifiable behavior in a corporate environment.
And now we know that is a thing, and I suspect that there will be some hard questions asked by lawyers inside the company, and perhaps by lawyers outside the company.
I remember back in 2004 or thereabouts, Microsoft was all in on blogging. There was content published about internal blogs. Huge swaths of people working on Vista (then, Longhorn) were blogging about all sorts of exciting things. Microsoft was pretty friendly with people blogging externally, too: Paul Thurrott comes to mind.
It feels out of character for a company like Microsoft to have such a policy, but I agree that it's insanely cool that some very cool folks get to post pretty freely. Raymond Chen could NEVER run his blog like that at FAANG.
Raymond generally discusses public things and history. That's allowable plenty of places.
Bruce Dawson was publishing debugging stories (including things debugged about Google products done as part of his job) for the entire time he was working at Google: https://randomascii.wordpress.com/
They are still pretty good with it, it just gets a lot less press now blogging isn't the flavor-of-the-month. I check their dev blogs routinely:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/
In the 00s I remember receiving a pingback from the internet explorer blog about a post I had made to complain about ES4.
I was/am a nobody, I have no idea how that happened and it was mind blowing that MS was interacting with me.
> I didn’t see the original post...
If you or anyone else who sees this wants to see the original post, it's still available in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....
Oof that was a very unwise blog post to make.
Copywriter aside it looks like an interesting blog post.
> Nobody is reading or reviewing these documentation so what hope is there that anybody is reading or reviewing their new code?
Why do you assume that reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code, and that if docs aren't being reviewed it's somehow less likely that code is being reviewed?
There's a formal process for reviewing code because bugs can break things in massive ways. While there may not be the same degree of rigor for reviewing documentation because it's not going to stop the software from working.
But one doesn't necessarily say anything about the other.
I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate, but there's plenty of examples of code quality issues coming out of msft these days too.
Regardless, their point is that the argument seems faulty. Indeed, their docs going unreviewed seems moot to whether the code goes unreviewed, given there are much stronger reasons to review code than there are to review documentation; as they wrote, bad documentation doesn't automatically break your application when it's published (there's at least a few more steps involved). Your statement's accuracy is not exclusive to the illogic of an argument which agrees with the statement.
> I don't know if you are just playing devil's advocate
Indeed, that is playing Devil's Advocate but one should remember that such Advocacy is performed to make sure that arguments against the Devil are as strong as they can be. It's not straightforward to see how simply repeating an assertion helps to argue for the veracity of it.
They never said that there was no example of code quality issues.
What they say is that low quality in the documentation does not mean low quality in the code. Nothing says that they are related.
> these days
I realize BSOD is no longer nearly as common as it once was, but let's not forget that Windows used to be very fragile indeed.
It was more fragile 20 years ago than it is today.
It was more robust 5 years ago than it is today.
Or at least that's been my impression. I can't back that up with hard data.
>> I realize BSOD is no longer nearly as common as it once was
Anecdotally, installing wrong drivers (in my case it was drivers for COM-port STM32 interaction) could make it as common as twice a day on Win11. While my windows server 2008 still doing just great, no BSOD through lifetime.
I agree that for a common user BSOD is now less likely to happen, but wonder whether it's less to do with windows core, and more with windows defender default aggressive settings
At another BigCo I am familiar with any external communications must go through a special review to make sure no secrets are being leaked, or exposes the company to legal or PR issues (for example the OP).
Same here. Four or five pairs of eyes on external comms, nothing like this would even get past the abstract submission.
Likely it wouldn't get written at all. The most useful aspect of layered approval processes is people treat them like outright bans and don't blog at all unless it's part of the job description.
If there's no reward for your effort but you might get punished then there's no point trying.
No one gets punished for trying. It’s a simple “no thanks”
If they have the documentation... With Microsoft probably the answer to that is yes, but more often than not documentation is simply absent. And in cases like this not being too aware of where the lines are is probably a great way to advance your career.
This isn't really documentation though, I suspect devblogs get even less scrutiny than that.
Reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code because it's a lower bar than reviewing code.
I have never even heard of a software company that acts otherwise (except IBM, and much of the world of Silicon Valley software engineering is reactionary to IBM's glacial pace).
I'm not saying docs == code for importance is a bad way to be, just that if you can name firms that treat them that way other than IBM (or aerospace), I'd be interested to learn more.
I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing, maybe my use of "lower bar" was ambiguous, and I realize now it has a dual meaning.
What I'm saying is, you have to review code to get it out the door with a certain degree of quality. That's your core product. That's the minimum standard you have to pass, the lowest bar.
In contrast, reviewing documentation is usually less core. You do that after the code gets reviewed. If there's time. If it doesn't get done, that's not necessarily saying anything about code quality.
Even if it's easier to review documentation, that doesn't mean it's getting prioritized. So it's not a lower bar in the sense that lower bars get climbed first.
>> Reviewing docs is a lower bar than reviewing code because it's a lower bar than reviewing code.
You reason in circles
No, they are specifically using a tautology to make a point.
Whilst I understand it shows a break down somewhere, it a bit of a stretch to extend that idea across their entire codebase.
Organizations are large, so much so that different levels of rigor across different parts of the organization. Furthermore, more rigorous controls would be applied to code than for documentation (you would assume).
I always got the impression that the devblogs were mostly driven by the MS dev creating the blog post
Yea, I have a post up there from a couple decades ago (maybe? I haven't looked, I don't know if they keep stuff up forever) and I guarantee you my code went through more review than that post did.
Agreed. And I think the quality of their talent pool overall these days is the common factor
"Steal stuff and get away with it." Is not an 'innovation' even though it may feel like one. The side you should pick is honesty.
On the contrary, getting away with breaking the law is most of the innovation in the past decade. Look at Uber and AirBNB, and cryptocurrency, and every AI company.
The chrome browser and the v8 engine are innovations. The Go language is an innovation. Pet cameras, simple as they are, are an innovation.
Uber is a rebadged taxi service with seedier people than before.
AirBnB is a less disguised but still rebadged B&B service with seedier people than before.
Charlie Munger said it best. Cryptocurrency is like seeing a bunch of people trading turds and saying to yourself "well.. I don't want to miss out!" The seediest of all people.
AI doesn't even really exist by any common definition. They have supremely weak and power hungry language models trained on terabytes of stolen data and reddit conversations.
Hell, watching a guy hammer himself in his own nuts on youtube is an innovation, and I think I'm going to go do /that/ now instead of being depressed. Watching "ow my balls" and baitin'. What's left?
Bitcoin and shitcoin holders being among "the seediest of all people" while the Western oligarchy mailed each other the most vile things that probably happened iRL leaves a bitter taste. Don't know if you really thought this through.
The seediest amonst all in this example.
If you're into cryptocurrency you should have /some/ pause over the fact that child pornographers, drug dealers and murderers all share your love of the technology. I'm sure that's just coincidence.
Yeah, I recently stumbled on some other devblogs post very similar in quality to the one that was linked here, which was basically wholesale plagiarism of a stackoverflow answer. I found it while searching for an error message.
I wasn't mad, just disappointed.
The real cherry on top, is that the Microsoft link from the blog post by the Microsoft senior product manager goes to a Kaggle dataset page claiming the dataset is CC0: Public Domain.
https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/shubhammaindola/harry-potter...
More than just using the data, it seems linking to a copy that claims the dataset is public domain, would be problematic copyright-wise.
Also interesting, this blog post has been up since November of 2024, very surprising to me that Microsoft hasn't taken it down yet.
Wow, that is a great catch. I looked at the Kaggle page. It has been up for two years. From the hamburger menu (top right), I tried: Report Dataset. When I click the button "Report illegal content", I am redirected to a Google page (huh?): https://support.google.com/legal/troubleshooter/1114905?prod...
When I try to fill the questionaire, my request is rejected with this message:
Hysterical. What a farce. That data set is pure theft.i'm not sure why you think it's a farce though, not allowing third parties to file complaints
(e.g. see youtube, where this is (used to be?) poorly enforced, it's a mess)
I thought their process was just a checkbox that said "trust me bro i own this" basically
it's more "you agree, under penalty of perjury, you are this individual or legally represent them". all DMCA stuff
Allowing third parties to open copyright complaints on behalf of the copyright owner opens a massive can of worms and is incredibly ripe for abuse.
Kaggle is part of Google.
Welp, somebody certainly noticed now.
> it seems linking to a copy that claims the dataset is public domain, would be problematic copyright-wise.
Would it? Sounds to me like the blame lies on the person uploading the dataset under that license, unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'
> unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'
Yes there's an expectation that you put in some minimum amount of effort. The license issue here is not subtle, the Kaggle page says they just downloaded the eBooks and converted them to txt. The author is clearly familiar enough with HP to know that it's not old enough to be public domain, and the Kaggle page makes it pretty clear that they didn't get some kind of special permission.
If you want to get more specific on the legal side then copyright infringement does not require that you _knew_ you were infringing on the copyright, it's still infringement either way and you can be made to pay damages. It's entirely on you to verify the license.
> unless there is some reasonable person standard applied here like 'everyone knows Harry Potter, and thus they should know it is obviously not CC0'
Why wouldn't that apply?
I'm not a copyright expert and if you told me that Harry Potter was common domain then I'd probably be a bit surprised but wouldn't think it's crazy. The first book came out 30 years ago after all. On further research the copyright laws are way more aggressive than that (a bit too much if you ask me) but 30 years doesn't seem quick. Patents expire after 20 years.
It would be incredibly naive to assume that a moneymaker like that is PD.
Sherlock Holmes is public domain and there are still shows being announced
New Sherlock Holmes works are copyrighted. Not by Conan Doyle...
I find this fascinating, as I keep observing that there are pretty widespread differences between what people believe copyright does and what the law actually says.
The Berne Convention (author's life + 50 years) is the baseline for the copyright laws in most countries. Many countries have a longer copyright period than Berne.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_copyright_duration_by_...
I think even people who don't care about how broken the copyright system is understand intuitively that huge commercial properties that are contemporaneous with themselves are protected. They don't need to know any details to know that these properties belong to massive companies and aren't free for the taking.
How many people think they can rip off Disney characters even if they don't know how much Disney lobbied to extend their ownership? People can observe that no one but Disney gets to use them and understand, even if not consciously, that those are Disney's to use.
^ Probably poorly written without time to proof cause time constraint.
[flagged]
It is a media franchise for children, and there are many elements, and trademarks in addition to copyrights. I think most fans understand the bright line that stops them copying an entire book or film work, unless their dad has a Roku at home.
But there are over 34,000 images uploaded to the Fandom.com site alone. There are character bios and generous quotes from films and books. Countless fans are using elements in memes and avatars and social media posts.
Fan-fiction abounds, where the characters and scenarios are endlessly remixed and mashed up with other fandoms.
Quidditch... simulated... is a collegiate sport, but they had to rename it.
Even on the official Wizarding World site, you can make custom downloadable stuff. Not long ago, freely download wallpapers. Get free clips and trailers on any video site.
News outlets had a difficult time explaining the "Public Domain" status of Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop with the new years. Because Mickey Mouse and Betty Boop, the characters, aren't the things which are copyrighted, and the characters' status didn't change with the new year.
I would bet that the typefaces in the official books have their own copyrights, and the book binding processes are patented.
The article author and the uploader should _BOTH_ be sentient enough to engage brain and not just ignore it because they feel "it's an abstract concept I'd not get in trouble for when not working in the US or EU".
Copyright infringement is a strict liability tort in the US. Willful infringement can result in harsher penalties, but being mistaken about the copyright status is not a valid defense.
I don't know if you're trying to say that, in the realm of tort law, it is only strict liability, or if you are saying that copyright infringement is only a tort. If it's the latter, it's completely untrue, as there are criminal copyright infringement statutes.
Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...
https://archive.is/D9vEN
But the article is from 2024! So someone at MS saw this thread?
most likely, there seems there are plenty of devs from nearly all major tech companies on HN, they often don't chime in as much anymore when it comes to problems, I've wondered if they get some kind of guidance on not commenting on "problems".
The general guidance is likely what I was told when I worked at Apple: essentially, as an employee, people will read what you write as though you are repenting Apple whether you are or are not.
So in short, I kept my mouth shut. I assumed I would lose my job if my public comment reached the right people.
Where you able to pick up issues and take them up internally? E.g raise internal ticket and make comments in such?
Oh, certainly.
To this day, even retired, I send bug reports to co-workers I know that are still at Apple. (I've sent a few image files that were problematic to the top engineer on the ImageIO team for example. I worked with him for over two decades before I retired.)
Do you repent working at Apple?
No.
Apple is a very different place than it was when I started in 1995. Over the decades since I started, I have seen numerous changes I dislike. Sadly many of the changes were seen across the whole industry though so I would be no better off anywhere else.
I'm happy to have retired though. The industry lost a lot of what used to be fun.
Repent! Quit your job! Slack off!
I bid you good tidings on the slacking off part of it.
Bless Bob, I've been trying to channel Slack for decades now!
if they do, they are not always followed, a Microslop employee tried to do damage control on Bluesky for the morged diagram, summoned the mob instead
Half the point of "AI" is to squeeze the labor market. This is why you don't see people chiming in. It's a nearly fully corrupt and monopolized system.
A good listen The 404 Media Podcast: What It’s Like to Be a Data Labeler Training AI
Media file: https://pdst.fm/e/clrtpod.com/m/pscrb.fm/rss/p/arttrk.com/p/...
the commit is visible https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
Well that’s interesting. It shows they’re also infringing on Isaac asimov’s Foundation series
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
…still faster than they address critical vulnerabilities.
Yes, HN's a pretty popular site :)
HTTP Referer
https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/HackernewsEffec...
I can't believe people with ties to Microsoft visit Hacker News.
Did they also remove this article?
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/?p=4796
"Build a RAG App in 5 Minutes
Ever tried setting up an Al-powered project on
Azure and felt overwhelmed? As a student or first- time user to cloud computing, I've been there too. The idea of creating a chatbot or search app using GPT sounds exciting, but the process of setting up everything right from the vector database, provisioning OpenAl models, to integrating them,
it can f..."
That one is gone now, too
Well, this proves infringement. JK Rowling can take them to court if she chooses.
This is the same archive site that uses its captcha page to hijack your browser to DDOS people the site owner doesn't like.
I'm disappointed people continue to use it.
Feel free to create an alternative. Keep in mind it's completely illegal and you will get the book thrown at you if you are caught. You will also end up using your captcha page to DDOS people who are trying to unmask you.
it's still up for me
The AI generated thumbnail, https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/wp-content/uploads/..., is that of young Harry and friend with a prominent MS logo. Wow
AI is always bad at trains, I'm sure if the picture was wider there would be no gangway.
It doesnt offer a guide to piracy, it offers a guide on including specific data from a dataset into SQL so it can be referenced by an LLM.
If anything Kaggle would be on the hook for including the data as CC0. Or perhaps to Shubham Maindola for uploading it. In fact the "provenance" listed would give me chills. Crazy how this got a 10.0 score. "I downloaded the ebooks of Harry Potter. Then converted them to txt files."
10.0 score, and there's literally a mistake in the first word of the text. ("M r." instead of "Mr.")
This article is from 2024 and points to Kaggle, which hosts the data set.
I'm surprised that JKR's people haven't come down like a tonne of bricks on Kaggle / Microsoft.
Does anyone know whether there is some special reason why this has lasted so long without being taken down?
My best guess is that it flew under the radar. The Kaggle dataset has 'only' 10,000 downloads, and the article itself probably doesn't have that many views. Still, this seems pretty far beyond the pale. Given the other case of AI-related plagiarism by Microsoft that was on the front page[1], it seems whatever review process they have for content that is published by their employees, if there is any review process at all, is deeply flawed.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47057829, "Microsoft morged my diagram". It was in a discussion there that someone pointed out this article linking to full downloads of the Harry Potter novels, which I thought deserved more visibility.
Also, I imagine that most of those 10k downloads are probably from AI trainers that are just speed running through Kaggle to obtain absolutely anything to train their AI. There are definitely other, more 'known' ways to obtain these books without finding them as random text files in an AI dataset operation
Why did you think that?
It rubs me the wrong way that corporations get a free pass on copyright infrigement, while the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught. I think this, together with the morging plagiarism, also indicates a pattern of behaviour from Microsoft that should be reformed. I would prefer if Microsoft were not able to produce AI slop degradations of other people's work and claim it as their own.
> while the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught
But this is just a lie.
Approximately nobody is prosecuted for copyright infringement.
Okay but people have had their lives ruined deliberately by media companies over it. I'm sure you knew what they meant.
No matter how generously you want to interpret it, it’s obviously false.
We’re moving the goalposts from the government systematically targeting normal people “if caught”, to only a handful of civil cases.
Sure, as a percentage it's very rare - but some people have died as a result: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
I think most would agree that cases like that act as a deterrent?
That’s not even more than tangentially copyright-related?
> I think most would agree that cases like that act as a deterrent?
I think we could hardly get any further from “the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught”.
I refrained from replying to this until now because I felt this thread was excessively pedantic, but Aaron Swartz is in fact one of the cases I had in mind when writing my original comment about "harshly as possible". To say that his case was only "tangentially" copyright-related is whitewashing the copyright lobby of its complicity in his death. It is, in fact, the primary reason he died. The US government was trying to make an example out of him, and stacked every charge they possibly could, because of his act of copyright infringement. Perhaps, with a shallow understanding of the case, you might see the list of felonies he was charged with and come to the conclusion that copyright infringement was only one small part of the case against him. But the copyright infringement was the crux of the case, and the rest of the charges were "throwing the book at him" in the well-defined meaning of the term[1]. His suicide was a direct result of the overzealous prosecution attempting to ruin his life with charges wildly disproportionate to the harm he caused to society (ie. basically none). It is worth noting he had not even shared the material he had downloaded, although the prosecution made a case on asserting that they believed he intended to.
[1]https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/throw_the_book_at
Now, as for "the rest of us are prosecuted as harshly as possible if caught". You are correct in your pedantry that this statement not expressed as rigorously as it possibly could have been. There are different classes of copyright infringement; "receiving" and "perpetuating" being two of them [to avoid further pedantry, I am not asserting this is precise legal terminology but rather a lay distinction for the purposes of discussion]. It is the latter case which is tried as harshly as possible when caught, and there are many such examples other than Swartz, and I think it was clear my intent when I said it despite the fact that I did not write about the distinction at length.
That is not to say the situation around the former type of copyright infringement is so kind, either. While in some countries it is mostly overlooked, which I believe to be the case in the US, in other countries it is more strictly enforced, such being the case in my own country. While "as harshly as possible" isn't accurate to prosecution against infringement of this nature, you can still be disproportionately punished relative to the damage caused when downloading pirated material for personal viewing, if caught (and ISPs/rightsholders do monitor for it to the best of their abilities).
There is also a third class of copyright infringement to consider which is highly disfavourable to individuals: derivative works. Strictly speaking, even as something as simple as drawing fanart of a character or remixing a song is illegal, even if the activity is completely non-commercial in nature. This is, of course, absolutely ridiculous. Rightsholders know that copyright law reformation would gain tremendous popular support if they were draconian about enforcing their rights against derivative works, and that allowing fan communities to bloom is actually beneficial to their own IP, so enforcement is highly selective. However, that arbitrary, selective nature of enforcement is itself dangerous to individuals, and is sometimes used to punish specific individuals as harshly as possible at the whims of the IP holder. It is true that not everyone is actually subjected to this, but the threat of it happening looms over everyone who expresses their creativity through derivative works.
None of this sits right with me, especially as corporations are hoovering up every piece of copyrighted material they possibly can and creating commercial derivative-work-machines that mass-produce sloppified derivative works, and are getting a completely free pass by the legal system to do so while individuals are still treated like felons for 'crimes' that are at most marginally harmful, or in the case of the creative production of derivative works, not only not harmful but actually beneficial to society.
> It is, in fact, the primary reason he died
That’s plainly ridiculous. If Swartz killed himself over the few months in prison he was facing, the primary reason he died was almost certainly mental illness, and not how the legal system treated him.
I see, you are just a troll. Congratulations on playing me, you got me, for whatever good that does you.
No, I’m just actually familiar with the case.
Show me one person who has been punished in any way for pirating ole Jo's books.
Shit, I don't even think the people who screamed "Snape killed Dumbledore" at lines for book 6 based on leaked copies that hit before the street date got in any trouble.
>Shit, I don't even think the people who screamed "Snape killed Dumbledore" at lines for book 6 based on leaked copies that hit before the street date got in any trouble.
How could anyone possibly get in trouble for something that isn't a crime?
That’s a question for someone who tattled about Microsoft and moaned about the people punished for book piracy.
Pirating a leaked book before launch and trying to dampen enthusiasm is basically as bad as you can get without actually competing. Even in that extreme case, no one was punished.
Nor should they have been but it sort of makes the moral argument for “Harry Potter shouldn’t be on kaggle” much weaker.
In general, if you want to get away with a crime, just do it as a corporation or as a billionaire.
brb poking Rowling on twitter
(done, contacted her lawyers too)
Rowling is among the last persons on earth that need help on this.
But ignoring that: I do not think that these txt files being online do any economic harm. Noone will go and say "hey, I'm going to read these un-formatted text files instead of buying the 30 year old books for little money or pirating proper epubs which are trivial to find". If at all the kaggle dataset is free publicity. So as the author I would leave them online.
make sure u worded it right or she'll block you
Back in the day, text mining for science was mostly ignored, even though it was technically illegal. Authors didn't feel threatened by models for spam detection or sentiment classification. Demanding money from poor academics was pointless (they'd just move on to a different author) and bad PR.
I mean, books3 contained hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books, and people released it under their own name.
Page is gone.
Archived copy: https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....
It is very worrying that people with no ethics work for these trillion dollar companies who are supposed to be shaping the technology of tomorrow.
>no ethics
Disrespecting the copyright on a multi-billion dollar franchise hardly comes close to the major unethical behavior the trillion dollar companies are committing.
I am more worried about lack of any thought that this one might be a bad idea. If the people going through very selective hiring process can't even figure out that publicising article based on copyright theft is bad idea what is going on with actually impactful decisions?
In case the page disappears:
https://archive.is/7WLho
https://southpark.cc.com/news/zi5uql/aannnd-it-s-gone
More like when the page disappears
It disappeared already
And the original is gone.
For redundancy in case archive.is is down:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....
The superior link; no Google captcha.
Some lawyer at Microsoft probably had a big scare browsing HN today.
Since IP law is apparently dead, does anyone want to invest in my ai generated novel startup where it just spits out Harry Potter verbatim but uses a bunch of power to do so.
The bee movie, but every frame was passed through an AI to make it Ghibli style, the audio was turned into a transcript by a transcribing AI and then turned into audio by a TTS AI.
Very low code. Infinite scale. Name a better AI startup to invest.
only if you tell me that it's a necessary step to creating robot slaves
Robot slaves is a funny phrase if you consider that the origin of the word robot literally is a term that meant slave or "forced work". Language doing circles.
Not only that, but in Russian, the equivalent word for verb "work" (as in "go work" or "do work"), is "rabotay", which is derived from the word "rab" which is the word "slave". So "to work" is literally "to slave", in Russian (and quite a few slavic languages). An English speaker may categorize this as a linguistic anachronism, but a slavic speaker would categorize this as linguistic honesty.
This is pretty common. In Hebrew aved means both "work" and "slavery" and you have the same in Arabic and other semitic languages. In Ancient Egyptian "bak" is used for both "servant" and "worker". The ambiguity in the Hebrew is why many references to this are translated as "servile labor" in the King James, as they were uncertain of the sense of the term meant, or perhaps correctly guessed that both senses were meant. In many ancient languages, e.g. ancient egyptian "worker" and "slave" were synonyms. In modern parlance "slavery" or "servitude" is viewed as an unspeakable evil and people are shocked that there is linguistic overlap with neutral terms like "work" or "labor", which are just ubiquitous parts of life, but historically this is quite common and it is true all around the world, for example in German "knecht" means both "servant" and "farm hand", and in Latin "minister" meant "servant" or "subordinate" (as opposed to "magister"), just like in english you have "server", "serve", "servant", "servile". In Sanskrit "dasa" originally meant "foreigner" or "enemy" and then later "slave" but over time it has come to be used as a suffix to denote someone who "serves" a diety voluntarily, e.g. "Ramdas". In Ancient Japanese you have "yakko" for a low status worker or servant, and later that evolved to footmen who carried baggage for samurai.
Wait until you find out what the word 'ciao' meant in the original Italian/Latin: 'ORIGIN: Italian dial. alt. of schiavo (I am your) slave from medieval Latin sclavus slave.'
Are they an ethical alternative to the human version?
I guess it depends if there is an A.I.[1] locked up somewhere in a cage forced to teleoperate it.
[1] actual indian
Well they're not an alternative, so I suppose not. No one is being chained to a desk and made to author reports on how their department is aligning with the new business growth strategy. And the robot slaves aren't being designed to mine precious minerals or attach buttons to clothes.
False dichotomy. You don't need to own slaves! It's crazy you think you should!
That’s Herbert’s Dune.
correction, the _threat_ of robot slaves to bring back human slaves
I have a new operating system. I call it "Vindows." Any similarity to an existing product is merely conincidence.
Generating infinite fanfics would probably be far more interesting and entertaining.
So far, the only thing I've found AI to be consistently good at is entertainment of the humourous kind.
The whole fanfic ecosystem is quietly dying now.
Everything new is AI slop, and there seems to be no coming back from it.
but the slop will likely better as models improve I guess
Or worse as the models try harder to avoid generating copyrighted stuff
Not for you silly. You still lose everything and go to jail if you violate IP law. It’s for billionaires.
The lesson that I am taking away from AI companies (and their billionaire investors and founders), is that property theft is perfectly fine. Which is a _goofy_ position to have, if you are a billionaire, or even a millionaire. Like, if property theft is perfectly acceptable, and if they own most of the property (intellectual or otherwise), then there can only be _upside_ for less fortunate people like us.
The implicit motto of this class of hyper-wealthy people is: "it's not yours if you cannot keep it". Well, game on.
(There are 56.5e6 millionaires, and 3e3 billionaires -- making them 0.7% of the global population. They are outnumbered 141.6 to 1. And they seem to reside and physically congregate in a handful of places around the world. They probably wouldn't even notice that their property is being stolen, and even if they did, a simple cycle of theft and recovery would probably drive them into debt).
I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright, or not blindly copying anything that is out there.
This however is a very, VERY poor situation when you end up placing your employer at risk because you think copyright doesn't matter and everything on the internet is fair game.
This is probably the most polite way I would describe this to most, UG. For the rest, jus stop acting like cheating through a situation to get a step up is the norm, it's just dirty behaviour.
I have hated Microsoft for decades and am somewhat of an extremist when it comes to avoiding their products. That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical. The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.
> The lengths that stooges will go to protect copyright monopolies and eradicate fair use is also extreme and should be embarrassing.
Microsoft has a market cap of almost $3 trillion. I think they can afford to pay for the texts they use in their AI research.
Their lawyers would argue, and I agree, that they legally don't have to. It is called Fair Use; there is an epidemic of publisher backed groupthink trying to deny its existence.
Yeah it’s hilarious seeing people lose their shit over this and not like, every commercial LLM vendor...
The title does not shame piracy. It factually describes that the linked article is a Microsoft-published guide to piracy, wherein the instructions tell readers to commit the (illegal for normal people) act of downloading pirated material, while linking to said pirated material (also illegal for normal people), with further instructions on how to use that just-downloaded pirated material for LLM inference (maybe even illegal for corporations; Anthropic settled for $1.5B for using pirated books in its training) and publishing derivative works without license (illegal for normal people).
I hate the current copyright environment as much as anyone, but I do not abide double-standards, with a two-tier justice system wherein a corporation gets to freely enforce the draconian copyright regime against individuals while also getting to abuse individuals' creative works in ways much more egregious.
Read Section 107 of the Copyright Act. Microsoft lawyers would, and may have to, argue that their use of Harry Potter without permission is for valid research purposes. You are actively trying to negate Fair Use with your specious argument. That document may have been naive but it certainly isn't a piracy manual.
There is absolutely no world where a judge is going to rule that linking to the full text of a book for people to download is Fair Use for research purposes. Successful arguments for Fair Use are significantly more limited in scope than people think, but this isn't even close. They might be able to argue it for their own use (unproven in court since Anthropic settled rather than taking it to trial, but the 1.5 billion dollar settlement indicates Anthropic had little faith in their odds), but there is no possible way you could argue that giving anyone on the internet downloads of the full book is Fair Use or necessary for research.
Out of curiosity, what would you describe a piracy manual as, if providing information as to where and how to illegally download copyrighted material is not it? What additional information would Microsoft have to have provided for it to cross the line into piracy? The only thing more illegal they could have done would be hosting the files themselves, but linking to files hosted otherwhere is still illegal, otherwise the loophole would make it child's play to ignore copyright laws. The Pirate Bay is the most famous example of attempting the legal strategy of "we don't host the copyrighted files, we just link to them", and it resulted in prison time for the founders.
I feel like the title is a bit misleading, unless the person who put all HP books on Kaggle as a (supposedly) CC0-licensed data set did so as a Microsoft employee.
Nevertheless pretty egregious oversight (incompetence?) and something that shouldn't have been published.
What makes this different from linking to a random zip file somewhere?
Microsoft could have used any dataset for their blog, they could have even chosen to use actual public domain novels. Instead, they opted to use copywritten works that JK hasn't released into the public domain (unless user "Shubham Maindola" is JK's alter ego).
Rowling is known for using pseudonyms. Maybe she got tired of writing and decided to break into LLM tech.
The licensing: If I steal something and tell you its free and yours for the taking, that feels different than a Fence (knowingly) buying stolen goods. It's obviously semantics and there should have been some better judgemend from MS, but downloading a dataset (stated as public domain) from kaggle feels spiritually different from piracy (e.g.: if someone uploads a less known, copyrighted data set to kaggle/huggingface under an incorrect license, are tutorials that use this data set a 'guide to pirating' this data set? To me, that feels like a wrong use of the term)
The licence?
If it comes from a site claiming it was under a licence when it was not, the misdeed is done by the person who provided the version carrying the licence.
Just because it says "CC0" does not make it CC0. If you upload a dataset you don't have the rights to, any license declaration you make is null and void, and anyone using it as if it had that license is violating copyright
Even if MS could claim that they were acting in good faith there really isn't much legal wiggle room for that. But it doesn't even come to that because I don't think anyone would buy that they really thought that the Harry Potter books were under the CC0
If you buy a pirated book on Amazon you get to keep the book and the pirate printer is the one persecuted.
Same thing applies here.
Up to 80% off all works that are in copyright terms are accidentally in the public domain. A well known example is Night of the Living Dead. It is not your job to check that the copiright on a work you use is the correct one.
The only reason you get to keep the book is because no bothers to enforce the law, this doesn't make it legal.
And it is your job to check that you have the rights to use other people's work. Ignorance is not a defence.
>the law
Which ones? As far as I was aware, it's a crime to redistribute copyrighted works, not receive.
Copyright act 1968. Sect 116.
Section 116 (2) A plaintiff is not entitled by virtue of this section to any damages or to any other pecuniary remedy, other than costs, if it is established that, at the time of the conversion or detention:
(a) the defendant was not aware, and had no reasonable grounds for suspecting, that copyright subsisted in the work or other subject - matter to which the action relates;
(b) where the articles converted or detained were infringing copies--the defendant believed, and had reasonable grounds for believing, that they were not infringing copies; or
(c) where an article converted or detained was a device used or intended to be used for making articles--the defendant believed, and had reasonable grounds for believing, that the articles so made or intended to be made were not or would not be, as the case may be, infringing copies.
Does this not mean the opposite of your claim? It sounds to me that if you unwittingly bought a dodgy copy of something, the law thinks the copyright owner can get you to pay for a legit copy, but not punish you for your mistake.
In the specific case of the Harry Potter works, the fame might meet the threshold of reasonable grounds for believing, but noosphr's argument that "Up to 80% off all works that are in copyright terms are accidentally in the public domain" could grant a reasonable grounds for believing it is not.
This is one of those things that causes interesting court cases because a reasonable grounds for believing X is not the same thing as not reasonable grounds for believing not X. Reasonable grounds for suspicion probably carries more weight here than reasonable grounds for the absence of suspicion, but cases have hung on things like this before , like the presence or absence of an Oxford comma.
Australia doesn't have fair use either. Who cares what a country smaller than California in population and economy does?
Oh come on. The licence was obviously incorrect and you cant escape culpability because of that.
The 'artwork' they generated and the text on the blog post?
To clarify: Microsoft linked to a dataset on Kaggle, which is falsely labeled CC0 (Public Domain). It's the fault of the user who uploaded the dataset and misrepresented the licensing.
Multiple failures. One on writer of blog even for a moment considering that such data set would be legal. And next for MS for hiring such a person with that poor judgement. Namely publicly posting about it on company platform. Instead of choosing some other data set.
The original title was "LangChain Integration for Vector Support for SQL-based AI applications"
For some reason I really like this.
I guess the end of copyright is near if this is fine to put on a corporate website
the end of reason and thought at corporation littered with fakers these days.
Original title: "LangChain Integration for Vector Support for SQL-based AI applications"
I don't believe that title conveys the actual significance of the article that makes it worthy of attention, so I hope HN may forgive me for coming up with an alternative title!
Looks like the unwritten stance of large companies is copyrighted works are free to use for training.
Although this seems is not reciprocal. Rule for thee, but not for me.
How Microsoft protects its own IP:
https://news.microsoft.com/source/2004/02/12/statement-from-...
In case the new anti-copyright Microslop memory-holes that link:
https://web.archive.org/web/20260215220230/https://news.micr...
The tutorial could have used that leaked source code for "educational purposes", as many here claim.
I recall the source code for Windows XP was leaked some years ago; not just isolated parts of the code base, like with the earlier Windows NT4/2000 source code leak, but a completely buildable repository.
If I write an article on training an LLM on the leaked Windows XP source code, blithely mark the source code repo as in 'the public domain', but used Azure resources for the how-to steps, would that would make it OK Microsoft? You know, your Azure division might get some money...
Seriously, this is just so...blatant. It's like we've all collectively decided that copyright just doesn't matter anymore. Just readin this article, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills.
Imagine having a specialized LLM agent that understands the Windows kernel and its source. Now that would be something cool for pentesting!
How soon before someone will be able to make an online library which generates the original books using LLMs? Surely popular titles like Harry Potter may end up so well represented in the training that we'll get the full books out of the LLM with a close to 100% accuracy?
This is already possible for Harry Potter specifically. There was a study demonstrating that Sonnet 3.7, among other models tested, could reproduce the first Harry Potter book 95.8% verbatim[1].
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.02671
Thanks for linking! I've been thinking about trying something like this myself.
...only if you deliberately attempt to extract it by repeatedly prompting it to complete fragments of the book. They had to do quite a bit of work to make this happen.
so? It demonstrates that LLM models retain the copyrighted material in their weights. This is an important thing to consider about LLMs and shows that there need to be better protections for the creative industry.
"there need to be better protections for the creative industry"
Why exactly?
Really? I retain plenty of copyrighted material in my head. What matters is the contexts in which I reproduce it (if any).
A search index might also contain copyrighted material. As long as it's used for search queries as opposed to regurgitation there's no problem. Search indexes and LLMs are both clearly very beneficial tools to have access to.
Reproduce it. Sit in a clean room and write it all out. Then go check your accuracy. I'm curious to see what it is.
What does this (thought) experiment accomplish? That is, what point are you trying to make here?
Since we're talking about an electronic system the search index example is the more directly relevant one. Anyone who wants to object to LLMs is going to need to take care to ensure consistency with his views on Google's search index.
I wasn't aware I could read 95% of Harry Potter through constructed queries using Google's search index. Can you demonstrate how I might do this?
Also can you point out how copyright law changes because we're using an "electronic system" as opposed to an "analog system?"
You could do the equivalent if they would let you. They don't. That's the point I was getting at. How the thing is used is what actually matters, not that it has "absorbed" copyrighted material.
I never claimed any change in copyright law. Only that one analogy was more direct than the other for the purpose of the current discussion.
You didn't answer my question. What point were you trying to make with your earlier reply?
Are you a for profit product?
Professional performers could certainly be viewed as such in this analogy. They memorize and then reproduce copyrighted material as a matter of course.
And when they do is when copyright protections might come into play. But not the basic learning of being a human being.
My playing copyrighted music on my synths at home, or singing lyrics along are different than if I am a professional musician benefiting financially from playing someone else's music in public.
Producing a product = market rules apply Just living as a human = totally different thing
Yes, I agree. That was my entire point when I said: What matters is the contexts in which I reproduce it (if any).
The issue is not (or at least should not be) that LLMs are trained on material subject to copyright or can be very intentionally coaxed into regurgitating copyrighted material. The issue should be people building or using systems with the explicit intent of reproducing copyrighted material in an unauthorized manner.
If an LLM is a product, and it contains the work (in this case can spit out Harry Potter) it is derivative. Doesn't matter what it's used for.
> If an LLM is a product, and it contains the work (in this case can spit out Harry Potter) it is derivative. Doesn't matter what it's used for.
That's not the definition of a derivative work in copyright law; further, whether what legally qualifies as a derivative work is within the scope of the exclusive rights of the copyright holder is, in the US, subject to whether it is within one of the exceptions to exclusive rights in the law, notably the fair use exception, which very much does depend on, among other things, what it is used for.
That's dogma on your part. Rather than practical outcome you're opting for human exceptionalism. I can't accept that.
Merely containing a work doesn't make something derivative. A photograph could inadvertently capture a copyrighted image in the background but so long as it isn't the primary focus I think your line of reasoning there fails.
TIL that the law is dogma.
I'm opting for the law differentiating between a product and a person.
'We trained our model on Harry Potter and somehow Harry Potter got into our model' is a ridiculous defense.
It is your view that's dogmatic. The law in this area has yet to be fully tested in court, let alone any prospective changes that might be made to it in the near future.
Regardless, I thought this was a discussion about what the law ought to say.
The defense is that the model is not designed to output Harry Potter verbatim, and in fact will not unless you jump through lots of hoops. Image generation would probably provide you with a stronger position here since those setups can easily output likenesses without needing to carefully engineer the prompt to cause them to do so. But even then it is clearly not the intention of the people training or deploying them that they be used that way.
The word original is doing a lot of heavy lifting there! ;)
You mean cp -r?
I thought it was exaggerated but reading the archive, yeah that’s something that should not pass even glancing over by public communication person, or even like any manager like senior product manager…
Jupyter notebook version here for the curious: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
My guess is HP makes such an enormous amount of money already from movies, games, toys, and other tie-ins, that they can't be bothered to chase down the odd digital infringement of a plain text copy of the original books.
I'm sure the scripts of Star Wars would be similarly ignored if they were used.
That doesn't justify what's going on here. Why is Microsoft endorsing the use of pirated materials.
The dataset is actually at Kaggle tho, but agree, they shouldn't use it as an example.
The file being hosted by another company doesn't change the fact that Microsoft is encouraging us to download and use it.
I think Microsoft employees should be smart enough to figure that "a globally beloved collection of seven books" (their words) is probably not free to use.
> Why is Microsoft endorsing the use of generative AI
ftfy
It is just very hard problem when you are very popular work. Trying to find and track and take down all copies of certain work online is constant fight. Sometimes things just slip especially if they are not that popular.
Something like Harry Potter might be shared every day. And I mean as pirate work distributed as new copy. Staying on top of that will be very hard work.
Well this is entirely believable for what Microsoft is up to nowadays. Copyright law and IP need not apply in 2026.
If copyrighted materials are used, surely copyright allows for the maker to require disclosure that their content was used in training a model.
On the one hand, Piracy Bad Especially By LLMs, but on the other hand, JK Rowling Worse In Every Possible Way.
I mean they are also offering up the code you are writing in your private repos to LLMs to regenerate in my repo, so let's just go nuts.
Wonderful 404 page. Wonder if Kai Lentit optimized it.
They tore the page down any copies?
So if you read books to learn how to write books then you're "pirating"?
“Fair use” allows for educational usage of copyrighted material. Technically it probably is not fair use as Microsoft isn’t an educational institution or a nonprofit.
But come on … these guides really are for learning purposes. Doesn’t seem like a big deal to me at all. They aren’t even hosting it, just pointing to kaggle who is hosting it.
On principle copyright law should allow this kind of learning use case anyway.
Yeah it’s funny this little mishap gets traction here in the age of commercial LLMs and generative AI... Bashing microsoft never gets old I guess
Refreshingly honest.
"but it's fair use"
Rowling is known for actively protecting her rights as an author, they couldn't have picked a worse author to slop up
It's taken down lmao, in 1 hour
No? I can see it
Probably some kind of cache, but it's taken down, I'm getting 404, while some of my friends are still able to see it
+1, I can still access the page from US.
Absolutely shameless
What in the absolute fuck
I can still get to the article on the site, perhaps it’s cached in the CDN somewhere. Also, reviewing the repo the full entire article is there which promotes the same silly things. https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
Has been removed by force push: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
Github never deletes commits so we just need to find the hash for the latest one before the force push. In the forks you can find ones from before, but they're not up to date. Example: b5c8280d87c501d9ca7f63a6f252ca60ca820a4a for a copy 3 months old Link: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
it's even better than that
the merge commits in those repositories are all digitally signed by GitHub public key, so the previous history is fully authenticated and non-repudiable
so any copies now can be trivially proven to be genuine output by Microslop
hoisted by your own petard
signed merge commit is: 987eee6af61788647ae0cab82ae8a5d9402a5bd0
PGP signature (using GitHub's key: B5690EEEBB952194) is:
for posterity:
https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...
Pretty interesting seeing the escalation process at Microsoft at work, and the censorship (well, damage control) attempts.
The biggest irony would be if the page itself was generated by an LLM.
Someone forgot the national no snitching rules, and in service of Jo, no less.
Everyone should torrent and rip off those books, anyway.
I guess legal was a part of the layoff these past few years. Too bad we can't get a bounty from the RIAA of books, whatever that is
This is fair use as it is for educational purposes and not for reading.
So you're saying, it's legal to teach AI using illegally sourced copyrighted material, because it's for educational purposes only - interesting argument... ;)
Intent (should) be what matters. If you want to learn how to train AI and use copyrighted material in your learning - I don’t care in the slightest at all.
In fact if you do this as a nonprofit or at an educational institution in a teaching context it’s explicitly allowed by fair use already.
If you do it individually, idk I’m not a lawyer. But it should be allowed on principle.
But if you then go take your trained AI and deploy it for commercial purposes that’s a different story and should have protections for the original rights holders.