A lot of people asking "is this legal?", but to me the more interesting question is should this be legal?". And I would like to debate the advantages and disadv

A lot of people asking "is this legal?", but to me the more interesting question is should this be legal?". And I would like to debate the advantages and disadvantages of this. If we go back to the very basics, the purpose of copyright is to reward and incentivize content creators. The purpose of fair use is to allow certain uses of a work that are beneficial to society, and don't substantially interfere with rewarding content creators. Consider for instance a parody. The parody does not substitute for the original work, so it will not interfere with the reward. Looking at copilot through this framing, we can ask whether it will interfere with rewarding creators. If Alice writes a program, will copilot trained on that product allow Bob to create a competing product more easy, essentially freeload on Alice's creativity? Yes, to some extent it will. On the other hand there are also advantages of allowing copilot. It promises to make software creation easier, for Bob, but also for Alice. Now, as this is trained on code that is posted publicly but not private code it will advantage private code over publicly posted code. This has the potential to harm the free and open source software movement. This movement is a positive in the world, so harming it should be considered a bad thing. But really, the big question is how big these effects are, and no one seems to have a good answer to that.