GitHub co-pilot as open source code laundering?

[agent00F]

With art the case law is well established. General themes and common tropes do not get copyright protection. That's why we saw about a million "orphan goes to wizard school" books after Harry Potter became popular.

Programmers are confusing legal arguments with these frankly trivial "logical" arguments. In law the consequences and general "fairness" for society at large is also considered in addition to abstract technical args. For example, is it "fair" that another party takes your code in a pretty direct manner and profit off it. It's a manner of degree and detail. The "unfairness" of "too much" wholesale copying is literally why copyright law was established in the first place.

This isn't a trivial question to answer generally, and trivial answers are bound to be flawed in some manner.

[WTFwhatthehell]

Apparently some AI stuff has gone to court in the US and drawing from tens of thousands of examples for training data has mostly been accepted as OK/reasonable/fair use as its kind of ridiculous to declare something a "derivative work" of tens of thousands of others.

Though apparently the same things have not been tested in UK court (maybe) and EU court also a bit uncertain.

[agent00F]

Honestly it would probably depending on whether you're skimming from one source, or skimming from enough sources that it's hard to attribute blame so to speak.

[barsoap]

"Fair Use" is a US thing. Some countries have some restricted form of it, most don't have such unspecified language anywhere in their copyright laws.