so basically all of Stackoverflow is copyright infringement and has been for decades? Find me the programmer who has never either 1) copied and pasted directly from the internet, or 2) taken an idea found on the internet and massaged it for their own purposes. I mean... this is basically why programming is so lucrative IMHO. Everyone is piggybacking off of everyone else's work (at least in open source)
A typical case mentioned in the training is that code from StackOverflow is (probably) licenses under CC-BY-SA 4.0 and as such it can never be copied inside their proprietary-licensed code base.
If the code is really sufficiently trivial (and I’d guess that most code samples you’ll find on StackOverflow are) you may have a fair use argument in the US. Generally speaking though (and especially for anything nontrivial) you need to respect the license. CC BY-SA 4.0 is one-way compatible with GPLv3, though, so that helps if you’re including it in a GPLv3 codebase: https://creativecommons.org/2015/10/08/cc-by-sa-4-0-now-one-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality
Then even if it is copyrightable, under some circumstances your use of it may be considered fair use anyway:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use#U.S._fair_use_factors
Or potentially de minimis:
https://blogs.library.unt.edu/copyright/2017/09/05/the-de-mi...
But when in doubt, ask for permission or ask a lawyer.
It’s not done equally though. Copyleft code is extremely likely to be on GitHub somewhere, while internal proprietary code is often not. Copilot will thus have been trained more on the former than the latter.
> I don't see how this is any different a form of "infringement" than me copying and pasting snippets of other peoples' code, and then modifying it to suit my particular context, without specific attribution
It’s no different, but that is also copyright infringement.