[jkaplowitz]

The world is global. That's a US court ruling from one court of appeals. Most countries have narrower fair use rights than the US. Even if Copilot would fall within that legal precedent (far from guaranteed), a legal challenge in any jurisdiction worldwide outside the US states covered by that particular court of appeals, or which reaches the US Supreme Court, or which goes through the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals due to the initial complaint including a patent claim, would not be bound by that result and (especially in a different country) could very plausibly find otherwise.

What's more, if any of the code implements a patent, fair use does not cover patent law, and relying on fair use rather than a copyright license does not benefit from any patent use grant that may be included in the copyright license. If a codebase infringes a patent due to Copilot automatically adding the code, I can easily imagine GitHub being attributed shared contributory liability for the infringement by a court.

Not a lawyer, just a former law student and law feel layman who has paid attention to these subjects.

[jkaplowitz]

> law feel layman

What a weird autocorrect typo. This should have read "law geek layman." (And it initially autocorrected again as I was typing this paragraph.)