By submitting any textual content (GPL or otherwise) on the web, you are placing it in an environment where it will be consumed and digested (by human brains an

By submitting any textual content (GPL or otherwise) on the web, you are placing it in an environment where it will be consumed and digested (by human brains and machine learning algorithms alike). There is already legal precedent set for this which allows its use in training machine learning algorithms, specifically with heavily copyrighted material from books[1]. This does not mean that any GitHub Co-Pilot produced code is suddenly free of license or patent concerns. If the code produces something that matches too closely GPL or otherwise licensed code on a particularly notable algorithm (such as video encoder), you may still be in a difficult legal situation. You are in essence using "not-your-own-code" by relying on CoPilot, which introduces a risk that the code may not be patent/license free, and you should be aware of the risk if you are using this tool to develop commercial software. The main issue here is that many average developers may continue to stamp their libraries as MIT/BSD, even though the CoPilot-produced code may not adhere to that license. If the end result is that much of the OSS ecosystem becomes muddied and tainted, this could slowly erode trust in open licenses on GitHub (i.e. the implications would be that open source libraries could become less widely used in commercial applications). [1] - https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-court-decision-for-data-science-and-machine-learning-44cfc1c1bcaf https://towardsdatascience.com/the-most-important-supreme-co...