I have no idea how this will ultimately shake out legally, but it would be absolutely wild for Microsoft to not have thought about this potential legal issue.
Nor can it be an entity to sign anything.
I assume the "not-copyrightable" issue, doesn't in anyway interfere with the rights trying to be protected by the CLA, but IANAL ..
I assume they've explicitly told it not to sign things (perhaps, because they don't want a sniff of their bot agreeing to things on behalf of MSFT).
>I have sole ownership of intellectual property rights to my Submissions
I would assume that the AI cannot have IP ownership considering that an AI cannot have copyright in the US.
>I am making Submissions in the course of work for my employer (or my employer has intellectual property rights in my Submissions by contract or applicable law). I have permission from my employer to make Submissions and enter into this Agreement on behalf of my employer.
Surely an AI would not be classified as an employee and therefore would not have an employer. Has Microsoft drafted an employment contract with Copilot? And if we consider an AI agent to be an employee, is it protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act? Is it getting paid at least minimum wage?
We do know that LLMs will happily reproduce something from their training set and that is a clear copyright violation. So it can't be that everything they produce is public domain.
I can't remember the specific case now, but it has been ruled in the past, that you need human-novelty, and there was a case recently that confirmed this that involved LLMs.
(Turns out the AI was programmed to ignore bots. Go figure.)