Google will protect customers who use some of its generative AI products if they are sued for copyright infringement, the company says.
in a blog post, Google said customers using products that are now integrated with generative AI features will be protected, in a bid to ease growing fears that generative AI could infringe copyright rules. It specifically mentioned seven products it would legally cover: Duet AI on Workspace (including text generated in Google Docs and Gmail and images in Google Slides and Google Meet), Duet AI on Google Cloud, Vertex AI Search, Vertex AI Conversation, Vertex AI Text. Added API, visual subtitles in Vertex AI and Codey API. There was no mention of Google’s Bard search tool.
“If challenged on copyright grounds, we will take responsibility for any potential legal risks involved,” the company said.
Google said it will pursue an “industry-first, two-pronged approach” to intellectual property compensation, covering its training data and the results created from its core models. This means that if someone is sued because Google’s training data used copyrighted material, Google will take legal responsibility.
The company said the indemnification around training data “is actually not new protection.” But Google admitted that customers wanted explicit clarification that its protection covers the possibility that training data contains copyrighted information.
Google will also protect users if they are sued for the results they get after using its base models. For example, if they generate a phrase similar to a published work. The company noted that this protection “only applies if you did not intentionally attempt to create or use the generated results to infringe the rights of others.”
Other companies have made similar proclamations. Microsoft announced that it will take legal responsibility for business users of its Copilot products. Adobe said would protect enterprise customers who use Firefly from copyright, privacy, and publicity claims.
Copyright issues have plagued generative AI platforms, with more lawsuits now being filed against different companies for allegedly infringing copyright. One of the latest lawsuits was filed by famous authors such as George RR Martin, John Grisham and Jodi Picoult.
Google has already faced a proposed class-action lawsuit for allegedly taking personal information and copyrighted data to train AI models. Reuters reported.
