Microsoft announced updates to its Services Agreement, which become effective on September 24, 2024. One of the Agreeement’s new features is an added section for AI Services, which is quoted in full, below.
Microsoft makes no claims for, or about, any content that users submit to its service platforms. Microsoft expects the users of its services either to have permission to use the materials of others. Users can’t remove information about the provenance of any content that they might attempt to submit as their own.
Understandably, the company also doesn’t want its users modifying the way that its platform works, or to extract content from it without permission.
AI Services
- s. AI Services. “AI services” are services that are labeled or described by Microsoft as including, using, powered by, or being an Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) system.
- i. Assistive AI. AI services are not designed, intended, or to be used as substitutes for professional advice.
- ii. Reverse Engineering. You may not use the AI services to discover any underlying components of the models, algorithms, and systems. For example, you may not try to determine and remove the weights of models or extract any parts of the AI services from your device.
- iii. Extracting Data. Unless explicitly permitted, you may not use web scraping, web harvesting, or web data extraction methods to extract data from the AI services.
- iv. Limits on use of data from the AI Services. You may not use the AI services, or data from the AI services, to create, train, or improve (directly or indirectly) any other AI service.
- v. Use of Your Content. As part of providing the AI services, Microsoft will process and store your inputs to the service as well as output from the service, for purposes of monitoring for and preventing abusive or harmful uses or outputs of the service.
- vi. Ownership of Content. Microsoft doesn’t claim ownership of any content you provide, post, input, or submit to, or receive from, the AI services (including feedback and suggestions). You’ll need to make your own determination regarding the intellectual property rights you have in output content and its usability, taking into account, among other things, your usage scenario(s) and the laws of the relevant jurisdiction. You warrant and represent that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to your content as described in these Terms including, without limitation, all the rights necessary for you to provide, post, upload, input, or submit the content.
- vii. Content credentials. When you use AI to generate certain content with our AI services, Microsoft stores information about its creation and associates this information and the content with a content credential. You may not create content with the purpose of removing or altering content credentials or other provenance methods, marks or signals that indicate that an output was generated by the AI services or otherwise use the AI services to create content for the purpose of misleading others about whether an output was generated by the AI services.
- viii. Third-party claims. You are solely responsible for responding to any third-party claims regarding Your use of the AI services in compliance with applicable laws (including, but not limited to, copyright infringement or other claims relating to content output during Your use of the AI services).
The full text of the revised Microsoft Services Agreement is 14,268 words long
Further reading
Microsoft Services Agreement (Full). Effective September 24, 2024. Microsoft Corporation
Microsoft Services Agreement. (AI Services section only) Effective September 24, 2024. Microsoft Corporation
Our commitments to advance safe, secure and trustworthy AI. Blog/article. by Brad Smith, Vice Chair & President, Microsoft. Micrsoft Corporation.
Why it matters
Microsoft is mindful of the possibility that users of its AI platform could be committing copyright violations, but other than identifying submitted content and associating it with its service platform users, Microsoft holds itself separate from any violations. They provide the service platforms, their features, and identify their permitted use-cases.
The government of the United States (and governments of other countries) are working with Microsoft and other platform operators to enable robust identification of content and the association of content with users.
At least within the above block of user terms, Microsoft does not make any mention about the acquision and use of outside content by Microsoft to train its AI platform; nor does it say anything about the use of content submitted by its platform users, to train its AI platform.
