People have sued over similar stuff in the past, like Google training their language model on copyrighted materials. The legal consensus is that a model trained on a large volume of copyrighted works does not infringe copyright, even if it occasionally vomits up chunks of the input model.

That said, if you trained a model specifically designed to violate copyright I suspect the courts would have a different opinion. They consider intent just as much as (if not more than) what you actually did.

Do you have a reference? Does this cover generative models?

This is as good a starting place as any. https://ilr.law.uiowa.edu/print/volume-101-issue-2/copyright...

This might sound stupid, and maybe it is, but that’s the state of law right now. It’s possible somebody will drag out a big slam dunk case that overturns much of this or that new laws will be passed… but right now (as far as I can tell) Copilot looks pretty legal.

(Of course, talk to your legal counsel, this may vary be region, etc.)

Here is a discussion of the Author's Guild v. Google case: https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...

The article says it is unclear if it covers generative models.

It's a bit different here. It's just supposed to regurgitate parts of it's input model.

Assuming GitHub isn’t lying, no it isn’t. They claim the vast majority of output is original, much like how GPT3 typically generates original text (although can sometimes output inputs verbatim). If that’s their intent and they haven’t deliberately tried to make their model output it’s inputs verbatim, then they’re good. Remember, there’s a big sampling bias online towards people sharing bits of code that are obvious verbatim inputs - you don’t see all the ones that aren’t.