If the code is nontrivial, then yes, it is a violation. To be in compliance, you need to write your own code.

If I am writing a novel and I copy a section verbatim from another novel, I am infringing on the other novelist's copyright, regardless of whether I wrote it from memory or not.

And this makes sense. For a trivial operation, there might be only one way to write the code. That's not copyright infringement, just like you're not infringing on an author's copyright by occasionally writing a sentence that was similar to theirs. For a nontrivial operation, you can easily write your own code without copying someone else's work.

Remember also that you can use others' ideas. Copyright only cares about the code itself. If there's a clever trick that you've seen someone use, you're free to use the same clever trick as long as 1) they didn't patent it and 2) you're not actually copying their code

fair use != trivial

It's not about fair use. If you have a problem that can only be solved by one specific implementation, that implementation is not copyrightable because it has no creativity behind it.

It's arguable. Copyright cares a lot about provenance, transformation, and commercial consequences. It all comes down to what you can afford to litigate. Some projects go to extreme lengths, like Wine not accepting code from anyone who has seen leaked Windows sources.

I’d be even more curious (more philosophically than anything) as to who is liable for the mishap if Copilot suggests something that ends up violating a license. Is it the developer? The developer’s company? GitHub? Maybe the “AI” is the ultimate scapegoat (“we can’t be liable for what our helpful robot decides to do”)!

The details might differ per country, but my non-lawyer intuition clearly says that you are responsible for the code you publish, no matter what tool has suggested it.

I’m sure at the end of the day that would be the case in most sane legal systems. However, it does seem almost impractical in reality for anyone to do anything about it (kind of like Uber/Lyft/Airbnb making something so commonplace so quickly that the regulations they broke became meaningless).

It's the developer. Just because you copy/paste something you find on SO or Google or Githib doesn't absolve you of copyright infridgements

In most jurisdictions, if the developer is an employee the legal liability is with the company.

There are many instances of people not even being able to see the code in question, see clean room engineering

An example for wine/proton/reactos developers from a moderator on the forum about the leaked windows xp code:

"You look at the code? You worked for MS? No dev for us! It's that easy."

https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=20189

There are many instances of large lawsuits where just seeing the old code made you in eligible to even touch the new code

> that developer encounters a situation in a corporate project where-in he uses the GPL code from memory

If you draw Micky Mouse from memory, Disney still owns the copyright.