[bitofhope]

I don't think I've seen anyone bring up patents. Those are a different matter altogether. "Copyrighted algorigthm implementations" is a little trickier, since any program code is essentially an "algorithm implementation" so there's a lot of potential nuance where to draw the line on where (if anywhere) a mere algorithm ends and a work with claimable copyright begins, in a moral sense.

Most software licenses are not full carte-blanche do-whatever copyright waivers. Sure, it would be hypocritical to get up in arms about copilot emitting CC0/WTFPL/Unlicense code, but comparatively little software is released under such licenses.

The GPL (in all its versions) is almost as notable for the specific conditions placed on the freedoms it offers as it is for those freedoms themselves. One possible reason to release your code under GPL is that it you don't want your work used in proprietary developer tools. It doesn't really matter then if the code is used in a proprietary developer tool's training data set instead of its own program code.

Even permissive licenses typically come with some conditions attached. If I release a program under MIT license and someone then uses portions of that code in their own project, I expect to see my name and the MIT license included in some way. Perhaps a line in the README, an ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.txt or a comment like

  // This function taken from quuxifier (https://example.org/software/quux)
  // ⓒ bitofhope 2022, used under the MIT license. See doc/licenses/MIT or
  // https://spdx.org/licenses/MIT.html for details.

The same, in my opinion, applies if recognizable (for some definition and threshold of recognizable, which can and does get deep into lawyer territory) portions of that code are emitted by a convolution network. If Copilot can write my function, why can't it write my name and choice of license too?

Even if you are a full copyright abolitionist, you can still point out the hypocrisy from the opposite side. Github's parent company Microsoft is notoriously protective of its proprietary code and its copyright. The company has historically been explicitly hostile to the free software community and despite its later unilateral declaration of love for open source continues to profit from their proprietary code, including Copilot. If you spend a decade or a few calling open source a cancer and campaigning against it, you can expect that to come bite you in the ass when you later try to sell a neural network trained on a vast corpus of free and open source software.