If you have an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music - that's still a copyright violation. Copyright law has no notion that the difficulty of reproducing copyrighted content effects the fact of a violation.

> an electronic piano that requires a complex series of button pushes to produce copyrighted music

Surely a judge presented with the "complex series of button pushes," otherwise known as playing an instrument, would hold the player accountable for any infringement and not the piano?

These analogies have gone so far off the rails that I can't tell which side this thread is arguing for by now ;)

I think the whole swirling discussion is a little confused because there are potentially two "ends" where infringement could happen, and different people are talking about each. And the article covers both.

One end is GitHub's, at the input: Copilot's "database" was initialized from code that GitHub does not have copyright to. The contention at this end is that they are ignoring the licenses that would grant them the right to use that code.* The article, GitHub, and others assert that there's no copyright issue for creating a database of this kind (a machine learning model).

The other end is the the developer taking Copilot's output. The article seems to take the (absurd IMO) position that there's also no copyright implications here, because the output is not copyrightable at all.

*And personally this is the side that concerns me most.