Copyright is (and has been, since the earliest days) about protecting the creative expression of an idea. You can't copyright an algorithm, but you certainly c

Copyright is (and has been, since the earliest days) about protecting the creative expression of an idea. You can't copyright an algorithm, but you certainly can copyright the expression of an algorithm in Python. You cannot copyright the words of the English language and their meanings, but Noah Webster absolutely did copyright his dictionary, which was a creative expression of their definitions (and lobbied for the first increase to US copyright law). Webster wasn't the "thought police" for trying to copyright people's understanding of words in English, because he didn't and couldn't copyright them; he copyrighted his expression of what words meant. If you read the creative expression of an algorithm in Python and then re-express it in English, then sure, copyright protection doesn't extend to that re-expression. But Copilot isn't doing that, it's quite clearly reproducing parts of the original creative expression of an algorithm, not the algorithm itself. Here's an easy way to demonstrate it: open up a source file in any language other than C and try to get Copilot to spit out an implementation of Quake's fast-inverse-square-root algorithm. You will very quickly discover that Copilot doesn't "know" the algorithm; it only "knows" the specific creative expression of it (comments included).