> ...some commentators accuse GitHub of copyright infringement, because Copilot itself is not released under a copyleft licence... This is not why. The issue a

> ...some commentators accuse GitHub of copyright infringement, because Copilot itself is not released under a copyleft licence... This is not why. The issue at hand as I understand it is that people using copilot will potentially have code snippets in their work that are already licensed they do not know the license for and that they will not license properly as a result. That's in the first paragraph. If you enter this discussion with an incorrect presumption from the outset I don't see how you can form a valid defense. > However, by doing so, the copyleft scene is essentially demanding an extension of copyright to actions that have for good reason not been covered by copyright. No. Nobody is asking for an extension of copyright protection, we are asking for the existing reach of copyright to be respected. We built our licenses based on a ruleset that we were told is fair. You don't get to violate rules you made and then claim that copyleft people only made their licenses because as a workaround to copyright and so are being hypocrites. > Others focus on Copilot’s ability to generate outputs based on the training data. One may find both ethically reprehensible, but copyright is not violated in the process. The arguments I've heard are not that Microsoft is using publicly available information to train it's AI. The argument is that people are potentially (and in some current cases demonstrably) getting copy pasted code snippets from licensed software. If you can't see the plainly obvious problem here it's because you're trying not to. Also a point made in the article, that machine generated things cannot be copyright because copyright requires a creator, brings up an interesting question as to whether works by people who used copilot can be licensed at all.