You've just described why tracking provenance is important to avoid copyright infringement. It doesn't matter where you got it from, if it's infringing it's in

You've just described why tracking provenance is important to avoid copyright infringement. It doesn't matter where you got it from, if it's infringing it's infringing. You can sue the infringing middleman, but that doesn't mean your transitive use isn't infringing. Microsoft should train Copilot on their own code. Theoretically they know where all that code came from and they haven't got a lot of copyright problems internally that would be revealed by Copilot. If they won't do that, that should factor into what we think of their arguments about what Copilot means for training corpus authors.