If you're a Google Cloud or Workspace customer experimenting with the company's generative AI tools, the company this week promised to protect you against any potential copyright claims.
"Put it plainly for you, our customers: if you are challenged on copyright grounds, we will assume responsibility for the potential legal risks involved," Neal Suggs, VP Legal for Google Cloud, and Phil Venables, VP of TI Security & CISO for Google Cloud, wrote in a blog post.
Microsoft made a similar promise regarding its Copilot AI last month, as have Adobe and Shutterstock as it relates to their enterprise customers.
These protections are in response to worries that AI could potentially plaigarize copyrighted work and open up a user or a busines to ligitation. Over the summer, for example, Google was hit with a class-action lawsuit for allegedly collecting public information to train its Bard chatbot.
Google's protections cover several products, including Google Workspace, Google Cloud, and the Vertex AI platform. It'll indemnify customers on two fronts: training data and generated output.
On the training data front, Google and other chatbot makers have faced pushback from authors, artists, publications, and more for using information they published to the web to train their AI chatbots. And while the company already has a third-party intellectual property indemnity in place, Google says customers have requested "explicit clarification" regarding Google's AI tools.
"Specifically, our training data indemnity covers any allegations that Google’s use of training data to create any of our generative models utilized by a generative AI service, infringes a third party’s intellectual property right," according to Suggs and Venables.
On generated output, Google says it'll cover content created by its Duet AI, Vertex AI, and Codey APIs. The coverage applies to all generated content from those sources in the event of a copyright infringement lawsuit.
"The generated output indemnity means that you can use content generated with a range of our products knowing Google will indemnify you for third-party IP claims, including copyright — assuming your company is following responsible AI practices," Google says.
Translation: Those who try to plagiarize copyrighted work on purpose are not covered.
