From an end user perspective, CoPilot has made my coding life dramatically better than any other tool I think I've ever used. The next closest being a good IDE which added code completion, documentation for functions, etc.

What it's functionally doing is incredibly valuable and I want to see it succeed. Figuring out how to navigate licensing effectively is an important step, but as someone who writes open source, I am happy my code is helping potentially make other people's code better too.

The problem is, that it's not only open source but also private repositories on GitHub which aren't open source and might never be.

That's not their stated position, obviously it's hard to verify but from there official stance:

"GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. It has been trained on a selection of English language and source code from publicly available sources, including code in public repositories on GitHub."

A repository being public does not mean that it's open source.

I love the people that spent decades railing against intellectual property laws and how you can "steal" knowledge are suddenly Disney-level militants on protecting software copyrights

I doubt any of those would have a problem if it wasn‘t a mega corp like microsoft trying to make profits of that. Microsoft has a history of being evil.

Not dramatized, evil is the correct word to describe many pf their practices.

Completely agree, especially with the evil part.

Unfortunately you can't pick and choose what copilot is being used for.

For example, it is a wonderful tool in cutting down the time needed to generate/write tests in TDD but how do you differentiate that between large chunks of proprietary code that it may spit out.

It has some benefits, but far more downsides, and Microsoft and its people in management have a history of being very evil in the truest sense of the word.

A lot of people see that as a trigger word instead and can't recognize it for what it is. What's that say about society when a majority can't recognize evil...

Completely disagree. I think that the output that it produces is sufficiently transformative to be considered fair use, and even when people coerce it to produce code verbatim - it represents a fraction of the original code base.

It would be like if J. K. Rowling went to war over the fact that I lifted a few paragraphs from Harry Potter and used them in an entirely different book.

Also this is entirely anecdata, but at my company I'd say we have about a dozen other engineers actively using copilot and not a single one of them has an issue with it. (ideological or otherwise)

I think people opposing Copilot are overly reactive, saying they fight for open source but actively trying to stop "Opener Source". Because Copilot is that - even more open than open source. So open that even open source people are angry. It learns skills and then makes them available to everyone. The gall!

Copyright should not protect ideas, only expression. The ideas contained in copyrighted works are fair use for AI to train on, even if you don't like it.

Copyright should not protect a lot of things but that hasn't stopped courts from ruling that things are protected by copyright (when they shouldn't be).

Take a look at the Chilton's Manuals, all the publishers were bought up and now its paywalled for a subscription, consists only of steps and procedures (know-how) so you can repair your own vehicles. That shouldn't be copyrighted.