Not exactly a huge distinction there because the licenses themselves provide exemptions to copyright, so by definition you're both "circumventing" GPL and committing legal copyright infringement if you copy it and don't attribute it under the terms the code's license requires.

Of course, the entire basis for LLMs being legal is that they use work collectively to know how code/language works and how to write it in relation to the given context. In this case, the legal defense is that the tool is like a human that learned how to code by looking at CC-BY-SA and other licensed publicly-available code and assimilating it into their own fleshy human neural network.

This only becomes shaky once you add in regurgitating code verbatim, but humans do this too, so the solution there is the copilot setting that tries to detect and revert any verbatim generated code snippets.

You can’t claim to have an entity with human-like understanding doing the coding if you don’t grant it basic human rights.

They wants to have it both ways: they want you to think the LLM is like a human because it’s “learning” (which in ML is the same word but completely different idea) so that you let them ignore copyright, but it’s not like a human of course because it can’t think, no sir (so you do not make them grant it human rights, because then they can’t exploit it like they do anymore).

> What Microsoft does is take your original work, create derivative works and sell them for profit. Unless it's under creative commons zero or public domain it shouldn't be legal...

Why should it not be legal? Doesn't that make copyright equally powerful with patents? Copyright should restrict only replication of expression not replication of ideas.

"Microsoft is circumventing the intent of copyright law" and "Copyright law should be changed or repealed" can both be true.

In this case we are talking about replication and manipulation of expression (for profit). Software doesn't understand ideas.