Hypothetically, if I wanted to learn how to code by studying open source examples on GitHub, should I have to go ask permission of each rightsholder to learn from their code? I agree that, if Copilot is based on a model that overfits to output the exact same code it read, the lawsuit has merit (and Copilot is not really ML), but the idea of ML is that the model doesn’t memorize specific answers, it learns internal rules and higher-level representations that can output a valid result when given some input. Very much like me, the coder, would output valid code when given a use case description, after studying a lot of open source examples of that. Should most programmers just be paying rights to all publishers of code they have studied?