You are right in asking that question. What just happens that when there are thousands of small violators, it's not easy for lawsuits to proceed. When there's

You are right in asking that question. What just happens that when there are thousands of small violators, it's not easy for lawsuits to proceed. When there's a central entity involved, Github in this case, there is someone discrete to be challenged or talked about. What Github has done is that they have not claimed rights over the generated code, and have passed on the responsibility to the developer/entity using the generated code. In other words, they are supplying tool that can make copies, not necessarily violating the copyright themselves {Foonote 1}. So the Betamax ruling can come into play here, AFAIK. What's thereby needed is that the developers now need to be educated about it, which is what the articles like the OP will end up doing. The developers often aren't well-educated about this stuff themselves, and presume that using generated code is just fine. See how I was downvoted here, as an example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27735484 {Footnote 1}: Whether the Github CoPilot model itself is violating copyrights is another matter. If the training data has included AGPL-licensed code, even that may be an violation. However, several other licenses would not be violated till the model is "distributed".