>That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.
and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.
>then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot
Right, the whole thing about arguing if copilot spits out a ten line function verbatim is not really what will be the problem, the problem is a human programmer still needs to run copilot and they will be the ones shown in the codebase as the author of the code (they could of course put a comment 'I got this bit from copilot' but might be cumbersome and anyway would hardly work as proof), although I suppose it would be not just proprietary code but code with an incompatible license.
> >That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.
> and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.
Yeah, but only to make it easier for them to argue it; the letter of the law doesn't require it. You could argue that "Sure, I read Windows source code once -- but that was years ago and I can't remember shit of it, so anything I wrote now is my own invention." That might be harder to get the court to accept as a fact, but it's not a prima facie legal impossibility.
and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.
>then you'd want to forbid contributors from using CoPilot
Right, the whole thing about arguing if copilot spits out a ten line function verbatim is not really what will be the problem, the problem is a human programmer still needs to run copilot and they will be the ones shown in the codebase as the author of the code (they could of course put a comment 'I got this bit from copilot' but might be cumbersome and anyway would hardly work as proof), although I suppose it would be not just proprietary code but code with an incompatible license.