Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/azure-sql/langchain-with-sqlvectorstore-example/

by anonymous908213 • 5 months ago

368 239 5 months ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

https://archive.is/D9vEN

andsoitis• 5 months ago

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?

anonymous9082138• 5 months ago

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.

zythyx2• 5 months ago

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

selridge4• 5 months ago

Why did you think that?

blibble4• 5 months ago

brb poking Rowling on twitter

(done, contacted her lawyers too)

k__o• 5 months ago

make sure u worded it right or she'll block you

thunfischtoast• 5 months ago

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.

miki1232112• 5 months ago

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.

arkensaw• 5 months ago

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.

amanzi• 5 months ago

That doesn't justify what's going on here. Why is Microsoft endorsing the use of pirated materials.

outside12342• 5 months ago

The dataset is actually at Kaggle tho, but agree, they shouldn't use it as an example.

blibble4• 5 months ago

Why is Microsoft endorsing the use of generative AI

ftfy

Ekaros3• 5 months ago

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.

conartist6• 5 months ago

What in the absolute fuck

dom963• 5 months ago

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?

anonymous9082138• 5 months ago

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

dom963• 5 months ago

Thanks for linking! I've been thinking about trying something like this myself.

Legend2440• 5 months ago

...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.

cadamsdotcom• 5 months ago

The word original is doing a lot of heavy lifting there! ;)

PeterStuer2• 5 months ago

You mean cp -r?

thrKan• 5 months ago

In case the page disappears:

https://archive.is/7WLho

boznz• 5 months ago

More like when the page disappears

agluszak• 5 months ago

It disappeared already

freitasm• 5 months ago

And the original is gone.

rlabnm• 5 months ago

For redundancy in case archive.is is down:

https://web.archive.org/web/20260105115129/https://devblogs....

FinnKuhn• 5 months ago

Some lawyer at Microsoft probably had a big scare browsing HN today.

qingcharles2• 5 months ago

https://southpark.cc.com/news/zi5uql/aannnd-it-s-gone

fxwin3• 5 months ago

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.

robrain2• 5 months ago

The original title was "LangChain Integration for Vector Support for SQL-based AI applications"

ASalazarMX• 5 months ago

For some reason I really like this.

blt• 5 months ago

What makes this different from linking to a random zip file somewhere?

zythyx2• 5 months ago

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).

Lerc2• 5 months ago

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.

fxwin3• 5 months ago

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)

philipwhiuk2• 5 months ago

The 'artwork' they generated and the text on the blog post?

uyzstvqs• 5 months ago

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.

Ekaros3• 5 months ago

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.

ThrowawayTestr• 5 months ago

Absolutely shameless

robrain2• 5 months ago

Original title: "LangChain Integration for Vector Support for SQL-based AI applications"

anonymous9082138• 5 months ago

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!

beached_whale• 5 months ago

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

stuaxo2• 5 months ago

AI is always bad at trains, I'm sure if the picture was wider there would be no gangway.

camkego• 5 months ago

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.

fxwin3• 5 months ago

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'

Retr0id• 5 months ago

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?

DSMan195276• 5 months ago

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.

rob_c2• 5 months ago

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".

pavon• 5 months ago

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.

throwaway2037• 5 months ago

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.

throawayonthe• 5 months ago

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)

Sohcahtoa82• 5 months ago

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.

nonfamous• 5 months ago

Kaggle is part of Google.

ChoGGi2• 5 months ago

Welp, somebody certainly noticed now.

electronsoup• 5 months ago

I guess the end of copyright is near if this is fine to put on a corporate website

larodi• 5 months ago

the end of reason and thought at corporation littered with fakers these days.

WillMorr• 5 months ago

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.

Kapura2• 5 months ago

only if you tell me that it's a necessary step to creating robot slaves

Den_VR• 5 months ago

Are they an ethical alternative to the human version?

Pfeil• 5 months ago

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.

cmxch• 5 months ago

That’s Herbert’s Dune.

ares623• 5 months ago

correction, the _threat_ of robot slaves to bring back human slaves

themafia7• 5 months ago

I have a new operating system. I call it "Vindows." Any similarity to an existing product is merely conincidence.

AlienRobot2• 5 months ago

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.

userbinator• 5 months ago

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.

fooker2• 5 months ago

The whole fanfic ecosystem is quietly dying now.

Everything new is AI slop, and there seems to be no coming back from it.

whatever1• 5 months ago

Not for you silly. You still lose everything and go to jail if you violate IP law. It’s for billionaires.

nz2• 5 months ago

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).

wewewedxfgdf• 5 months ago

Refreshingly honest.

selridge4• 5 months ago

Someone forgot the national no snitching rules, and in service of Jo, no less.

Everyone should torrent and rip off those books, anyway.

thehamkercat2• 5 months ago

It's taken down lmao, in 1 hour

actionfromafar• 5 months ago

No? I can see it

anpat• 5 months ago

+1, I can still access the page from US.

thehamkercat2• 5 months ago

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

outside12342• 5 months ago

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.

mcny• 5 months ago

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.)

crazygringo2• 5 months ago

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.

jacquesm3• 5 months ago

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.

shadowgovt• 5 months ago

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.

novaleaf2• 5 months ago

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.

smadge• 5 months ago

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).

miki1232112• 5 months ago

This isn't really documentation though, I suspect devblogs get even less scrutiny than that.

keithnz2• 5 months ago

I always got the impression that the devblogs were mostly driven by the MS dev creating the blog post

lazyasciiart• 5 months ago

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.

anonymars2• 5 months ago

Agreed. And I think the quality of their talent pool overall these days is the common factor

themafia7• 5 months ago

"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.

direwolf202• 5 months ago

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.

NoPicklez• 5 months ago

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).

anonymars2• 5 months ago

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.

efitz• 5 months ago

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.

bastawhiz• 5 months ago

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.

Sophira• 5 months ago

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....

bryan_w• 5 months ago

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

pbrum• 5 months ago

Update: Microsoft has taken the page down. But posterity being what it is...

https://archive.is/D9vEN

lukeinator42• 5 months ago

it's still up for me

ed_mercer• 5 months ago

But the article is from 2024! So someone at MS saw this thread?

refulgentis• 5 months ago

Yes, HN's a pretty popular site :)

dd8601fn• 5 months ago

…still faster than they address critical vulnerabilities.

keithnz2• 5 months ago

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".

AlienRobot2• 5 months ago

I can't believe people with ties to Microsoft visit Hacker News.

RupertSalt2• 5 months ago

HTTP Referer

https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/web/HackernewsEffec...

basch2• 5 months ago

the commit is visible https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...

andrelaszlo• 5 months ago

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..."

kQq9oHeAz6wLLS• 5 months ago

That one is gone now, too

stogot5• 5 months ago

Well, this proves infringement. JK Rowling can take them to court if she chooses.

LeoPanthera• 5 months ago

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.

direwolf202• 5 months ago

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.

rfc2324• 5 months ago

Jupyter notebook version here for the curious: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...

miffy900• 5 months ago

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.

cookiengineer2• 5 months ago

Imagine having a specialized LLM agent that understands the Windows kernel and its source. Now that would be something cool for pentesting!

til_something• 5 months ago

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/...

philipwhiuk2• 5 months ago

Has been removed by force push: https://github.com/Azure-Samples/azure-sql-db-vector-search/...

Expulsion5491• 5 months ago

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/...

rob_c2• 5 months ago

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.

hulitu2• 5 months ago

I... There are parts of the world where certain developers don't understand the way the west tends to work with regard to copyright

Yes, like USA. Copyright, and laws in general, are for you but not for me.

blibble4• 5 months ago

"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

starkeeper• 5 months ago

They tore the page down any copies?

throwaway150• 5 months ago

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.

ribosometronome2• 5 months ago

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.

Ekaros3• 5 months ago

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?

bvan• 5 months ago

Wonderful 404 page. Wonder if Kai Lentit optimized it.

ece• 5 months ago

If copyrighted materials are used, surely copyright allows for the maker to require disclosure that their content was used in training a model.

charcircuit• 5 months ago

This is fair use as it is for educational purposes and not for reading.

davsti4• 5 months ago

So you're saying, it's legal to teach AI using illegally sourced copyrighted material, because it's for educational purposes only - interesting argument... ;)

JB_Dev2• 5 months ago

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.

protocolture• 5 months ago

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."

Thorrez• 5 months ago

10.0 score, and there's literally a mistake in the first word of the text. ("M r." instead of "Mr.")

JB_Dev2• 5 months ago

“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.

Guillaume862• 5 months ago

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

lak-102• 5 months ago

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.

8cvor6j844qw_d6• 5 months ago

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.

ozim• 5 months ago

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…

ErroneousBosh• 5 months ago

On the one hand, Piracy Bad Especially By LLMs, but on the other hand, JK Rowling Worse In Every Possible Way.

waffletower3• 5 months ago

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.

teachrdan• 5 months ago

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.

waffletower3• 5 months ago

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.

anonymous9082138• 5 months ago

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.

waffletower3• 5 months ago

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.

Guillaume862• 5 months ago

Yeah it’s hilarious seeing people lose their shit over this and not like, every commercial LLM vendor...

hulitu2• 5 months ago

That being said, this piracy shaming headline for a Microsoft research project example, not a product integration, is entirely misleading and hysterical

Tell that to people haunted by BSA.

geldedus• 5 months ago

So if you read books to learn how to write books then you're "pirating"?

ramuel• 5 months ago

Well this is entirely believable for what Microsoft is up to nowadays. Copyright law and IP need not apply in 2026.

Microsoft guide to pirating Harry Potter for LLM training (2024) [removed]

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