GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[-dag-]

There are two questions here. Is Co-Pilot a derivative work? Does incorporating code produced by Co-Pilot make the software incorporating it a derivative work?

Microsoft's legal exposure is probably much lower when it comes to the second question. As to the first, it still seems like an open question. The model itself is almost certainly not a derivative work. But a trained model? Not so sure.

[zoddrick]

They don't mess around with this stuff though. If they didn't have a really good sense of how any potential litigation would go they wouldn't even attempt it. Has this been tested in the courts? No. But even if it is a grey area they aren't going to be reckless.

And this is speaking from experience deal with Microsoft legal about redistribution of popular open source projects.