Sharing with license intact. If GH is sharing with the license and attribution stripped, then just punting IP vetting to pilot users, it seems to exceed their rights.
Why do people refuse to have even a pre-high-school level of of understanding of licensing? By uploading your code to Github you are granting them their own license to the code under their terms. Your LICENSE file has absolutely nothing to do with it. Your LICENSE file can say "everyone but Github" and wouldn't matter one jot because that's not the license you licensed it to them under.
And if you didn't have the rights to grant the licenses to Github? Then you are in violation of the copyright holder's rights, not Github.
The only remotely plausible, yes-I-have-graduated-fifth-grade argument against Github is that they ought to and certainly do know that huge portions of their users are in fact granting them licenses without the necessary authority. That's an interesting argument we should be having, and instead we're having this inane screaming match by people who have no clue what they're talking about while some of us are sitting here going WTF is wrong with you?
I am discussing the license grant GH includes in its terms. And that doesn't appear to give them a blank check to do anything they want with code those users have uploaded. Certainly not sell it piecemeal.
IANAL, but it's pretty clear that GH explicitly says they will NOT distribute the code. I'm not sure what else you'd call offering to copy a section of code.
"It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service."
Throughout the license, the Content is treated as an indivisible unit, and it specifically refers to the forking functionality. Notice that forking...forks an entire repository, licenses included, etc. You can't fork a single file, and you can't fork a region of a file. GH provides that kind of forking.
Copilot is fine-grained forking.
No significant software company is going to permit copilot to be used and potentially poison their code base in unknown ways, now that this kind of copying is in the open and is clearly a significant danger.
Somebody like Black Duck is going to make a lot of money for trial attorneys by tracing how code was created and finding the "hits". That will be joined with log data indicating who used copilot, when they used it, and exactly what copilot presented as the "hit". This entire process will be performed recursively on the "hit", together with classic source analysis, to find out where something is really from.
The bigger companies are really, really serious about not copying outside code except under really strict conditions -- these conditions mostly look like "no you may not, unless you have one of these specific situations". It's no-by-default, even when it looks like it could be a yes.
Once someone uses copilot they now have code fragments outside GH and stripped of attribution and license. Looks like GH is trying to say these users need to do their own IP vetting. Which seems very impractical for anyone, even the creators of GH copilot.
There's nothing about "license intact" in those clauses. GitHub is able to do whatever it wants with the data; any users of the service do have to check on licenses, as they should with any source (including copying from Stack Overflow)
Cameras and paint brushes can easily make non-infringing works. Users of them can easily be trained how to avoid taking others work.
Copilot on the other hand basically defaults to infringing behavior. Users would have to go to great lengths to be sure they aren't infringing on others work.
And if you didn't have the rights to grant the licenses to Github? Then you are in violation of the copyright holder's rights, not Github.
The only remotely plausible, yes-I-have-graduated-fifth-grade argument against Github is that they ought to and certainly do know that huge portions of their users are in fact granting them licenses without the necessary authority. That's an interesting argument we should be having, and instead we're having this inane screaming match by people who have no clue what they're talking about while some of us are sitting here going WTF is wrong with you?