You ask a very insightful question. Let me see where I end up running out the analogy in a certain direction. If Danger Mouse sold a remixing tool that enable

You ask a very insightful question. Let me see where I end up running out the analogy in a certain direction. If Danger Mouse sold a remixing tool that enable widespread remixing of any/all albums, would DM be profiting illegally from the content of others? In each individual case, the remix album produced would have to pass the fair use tests, and if the user produced a sufficiently close replica, they could be restrained from distributing it. But that wouldn’t implicitly be the remixing tool’s fault, unless it mechanically reproduced a complete protected work with the user completely unaware it was doing so. A dedicated user can make any tool produce a protected work, so we have to aim for the narrow window of user-oblivious in order to fault the tool. Translating back to Copilot, this then becomes the question: can Copilot regurgitate an entire protected work for a user who then sells that work, with the user being fully unaware that they have reproduced a protected work without meeting fair use terms, such that Copilot is responsible? Copilot requires user prompting to emit code, and seems to draw the line at around the single function boundary, so reproducing an entire codebase becomes exponentially less likely as the number of functions increases. So if there were a weakness in Copilot’s defense, it would be in small single-function programs, at which point the parallel to another music case comes to mind: the person who generated and copyrighted every single musical phrase in Western major/minor, to prove that the law as written is not applicable when the total size and complexity of a given work falls below a certain threshold. I thus assume that Copilot is essentially protected in the single function case - it doesn’t matter if you have a protected work for (‘four’ (2 2 +) func), because that’s so simplistic that any human might reproduce it at any time unaided, and so claiming against them would fall flat when a judge applies the common sense threshold. It’s a high bar to expect a judge to recognize this analogy and understand code well enough, but I think between user intention to break fair use being required for complex multi-function systems, and the protection of snippets being essentially impossible to enforce against in music terms, would absolutely shield Copilot from being judged liable and owing damages. (General disclaimer applies: I am not your lawyer, please seek legal counsel before making use of my opinion, etc.)