Hacker News Reader

Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

> "To the extent necessary to provide the Services to you and others, to protect you and the Services, and to improve Microsoft products and services, you grant to Microsoft a worldwide and royalty-free intellectual property license to use Your Content, for example, to make copies of, retain, transmit, reformat, display, and distribute via communication tools Your Content on the Services," the clause reads.

Well, this does make sense in the context of Office 365, OneDrive and the Office web apps in general. (Still dodgy regarding the "worldwide" part but there's no way around that because people can and do expect to access their stuff even while on vacation)

Silently enabling the training of remote AI however? That's not covered under any reasonable interpretation of the above legalese.

View on HN

IANAL, but I think the "to improve Microsoft products and services" bit does mean that they do legally get to train their AI (which is a Microsoft service) on your data. Still a bastard move though.

>… intellectual property license to use Your Content

Seems clear to me. Use any way Microsoft wants. The “for example” list is not exhaustive nor limiting.

IANAL again, but I don't think they get to do literally anything with your data. The phrase used is "to the extent necessary". For instance, I don't think they could scrape their user data for trade secrets and then sell those to the highest bidder.

Why not? Isn’t that the essential ethos Microsoft was founded on?

I thought it was founded on Bill Gates’s mommy having strong connections to IBM that allowed little Bill to keep the rights to the source code they paid him to write. And the privileged position of having access to a computer at his school when 99.9% of the population did not.

Because they boxed themselves in with legalese. Companies would definitely switch off Microsoft services if at all possible if the company's lawyers thought their trade secrets were getting sold off. So I think the "as necessary" framing does probably prevent them from doing some things.

As I laid out in my other comment, I think training AI in particular is covered under the "improving Microsoft products or services" bit of legalese. I do wonder how companies lawyers will respond to this though. They probably thought of that phrase as just allowing Microsoft employees access to documents to see how Word or other pieces of software were being used, or to fix crashes, etc.

"The funds from the bidder will be invested in to products in order to make a better user experience" /s

Reminds me of “this call will be used for training and quality purposes.”

Who defines “necessary?” Use of Your Content is Necessary to support Microsoft’s business activities, including, but not limited to, training their AI.

There are other laws protecting things like trade secrets and corporate privacy, so it would indeed be foolish for Microsoft to attempt gathering and selling trade secrets. But the wording gives them carte blanche to do anything not already illegal, including using your Most Awesome Word Template in Word’s collection of templates that they distribute to everyone.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com