GitHub's TOS is subject to change so that doesn't hold water. Tomorrow they could claim in their TOS you owe them your firstborn if you upload code to GitHub but that doesn't mean that you are bound by those terms because they cross the reasonable expectation of what you are signing up for. Granting Microsoft a blanket license to use your code in any way they see fit was not a part of the deal for GitHub, and as far as I know it still isn't for code that you claim copyright on. If you release your code into the public domain or use a license that is so permissive that anybody can use it at will, even without attribution that would make it fair game.
Well, that's why major TOS changes are accompanied by the option to discontinue using that service. Usually they say that continuing to use the service after a certain date constitutes your agreement to the new terms.
I think we're over here in our armchairs weirdly assuming that GitHub doesn't have any lawyers working for them. I think they know they're legally in the clear on CoPilot.
I'm not at all a lawyer, but in my opinion we observe that the non-automated version of AI-generated works (the act of making art and prose in the style of an existing copyright work based on the artist's observation of that work) is not illegal. The only thing that AI introduces is automation.
I see Copilot as a trial balloon. If they get away with it you can expect the next move to appropriate the body of open source that is GitHub. Why the archenemy of open source should suddenly be trusted to play nice is something I really can't grasp.
It's not sudden - they've owned it for a while now.
What I can't understand is people feel locked into Github because of the social features. To me they seem the least important part of Github, particularly with so many OSS projects running communities on Discord or Slack.
