Comment by iepathos

Humans do violate copyright if they use copyrighted passages directly in their work and pass it off as their own without any attribution, which is what copilot has been show to sometimes do, though not always. Copilot will sometimes offer chunks of code that can be found verbatim in open source code bases and passes it off to users without attribution. I agree it is ok to learn from copyrighted work and reproduce new different work from a human or a machine learning algorithm, but it isn't ok to pass along exact copies as your own without attribution. Microsoft will likely need to add checks to prevent copilot from offering verbatim copies of code going forward to try to avoid copyright violations here.