> It looks a lot more like trolling if an otherwise incredibly useful and productivity-boosting technology is being stymied by people who want to receive payouts for a lack of meaningless attributions.
This one sentence threw off my entire opinion of the article as it demonstrates the author's clear bias in favor of Copilot, not just specifically in this case but in principle.
Legal opinion on Copilot and generative AI in general hinges entirely on metaphors. If the AI is understood to behave like a human being building knowledge and drawing from it for inspiration, Copilot is just another way to write code. But we've already established legal precedent that machines can not hold copyright, which suggests that they can not be deemed to be creative, which could be used to argue that they are therefore just creating an inventory of copyright works and creating mechanical mashups.
The author's dismissal also ignores that this would not JUST result in attribution. If Copilot indexed copyleft code and were required to provide attribution when using this code, the output might also be affected and this could in turn affect the entire code base. Worse yet, Copilot may output code with conflicting licenses. The author considers only the possibility that Copilot itself might have to inherit the license (and the dismissal that it would "help noone" because it runs on a server ignores both the existence of a (presumably self-hosted) enterprise service and the existence of licenses like AGPL, which would still apply) but it seems most people's concerns are with the output instead.
I also fail to understand how the argument that it doesn't reproduce the code exactly 99% of the time is helpful. If I copy code and rename the variables and run an autoformatter on it, it's still a copy of the code. It's odd to see a lawyer use what is essentially obfuscation as a defense against copyright claims. Also 1% is an incredibly large number given how Copilot is supposed to be used and how large the potential customer base is. Given the direction GitHub is heading with "Hello GitHub" (demoed at GitHub Universe yesterday) it's not unlikely that Copilot would in some cases be used to generate hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code in a single project.
The question isn't just whether Copilot is violating the law or not, the question is why it is or isn't because that could have wide implications outside GitHub itself. But as the author points out, sadly the lawsuit doesn't try to settle this for copyright, which might be the most impactful question.