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by emodendroket 1807 days ago
But that is in fact the most fundamental question here. And I’m not fully sold on the idea either that this is going to happen in real-world usage or that a single function in a massive program constitutes a large enough portion to be infringing.
2 comments

Quake's square root function wasn't the only, or the largest, example of code Copilot reproduces verbatim. Among others I've seen to date is someone generating a real "About" page with PII information of some random software developer.

How much code is enough to infringe is a tricky question, though. It's not only a function of size, but also of importance/uniqueness - and we know that Copilot doesn't understand these concepts.

> ... or that a single function in a massive program constitutes a large enough portion to be infringing.

As part of the sequences of rulings in Google vs Oracle, the 9-line rangeCheck function, in the entirety of the Android codebase, was found to be infringing.