I think a key thing here is your identification of a paragraph. Nobody would think to exert copyright over individual words. Phrases and epigrams are considered worthy of attribution, but only in exceptional cases. Copying sentences is starting to get into plagiarism, though single sentences would usually be forgiven because noting or remembering a single sentence while forgetting the source is an easy mistake to make. Copying whole paragraph, by contrast, is unlikely to be casual.
I think in programming therms a useful parallel might be copying at the module rather than the statement or function level. For example, if I write some code prompts to do the following:
- validate my API key with Twitter
- solicit the input of a Twitter username
- download the up to 500 of that user's tweets
- convert the json to a dataframe
- plot the derivative of the intervals between tweets
Or here is the real analagous question:
Fair use is about more than just the size of the excerpt.
If you write an article about good writing, and quote a choice paragraph from someone else's work to show an example, and credit that quote, that is fair use.
Is it fair use if you read an awesome paragraph, something that really is the result of the authors unique intellect and effort and craftsmanship, and makes you think "damn", and then drop that same jewel into your book?
You can probably get away with it, because you probably just won't be able to convince a judge that any single paragraph is that big of a theft.
But I don't mean to ask if you can get away with it, I mean to ask if it should be considered fine honorable behavior.
The difference is, the paragraph isn't being included for examination or comment or transformation, it's being included to directly copy and perform it's original function as part of what makes a work a great work, and, it's not being credited in any bibliography.
This is what copilot is doing, or rather it's facilitating people doing it, as far as I can tell.
The original snippets are functional not there for examination, copied verbatim not transformed (sometimes), and not credited.
Most of it comes from open source works anyway and most authors would probably be fine with it if the stuff was simply credited.