One thought is that in construction you will learn to do things through others teaching you. And then you’ll do them at future sites, and they’ll be nearly identical. There’s only so many ways to build walls or run electrical, etc. to code.
I think coding is often similar. Let’s not fool ourselves: a lot of what we write isn’t novel or interesting or challenging. It’s the total end product that is.
That said, to my non-legal mind, I don't see Copilot as being that much different from taking a code block from a book or Stack Overflow or wherever to implement some function. Clearly there are some limits; Copilot probably couldn't lift an entire grammar checker or whatever. But people reuse function templates and the like all the time and no one generally cares. And I doubt most people upset about Copilot really want the copyright police scrutinizing every single line of code.
I think that’s another item I keep thinking about. Why should code be copyrightable? Especially when so much of it is just, like plumbing, just plumbing.
I think I might share your thoughts. Isn’t copilot just a template/boilerplate generator but on steroids?
If anything, I think Copilot is forcing the industry to recognize: a lot of the code people write is not the valuable or interesting part. The real value is in figuring out what to write and in what way it should all be connected together and interacted with.
This was an open question for a long time. Is it just a set of functional instructions about how to do something (which wouldn't typically be copyrightable) or is it a creative work?
It wasn't even an interesting question in the early part of the computer industry because software was mostly something created so that companies could sell hardware. Or it was written for internal use.
However, in 1974 the Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works (CONTU) was established in the US and decided computer programs were in general copyrightable. Congress added this to copyright law in 1980.