Can I post code examples with GPL software on Stack Overflow? - https://opensource.stackexchange.com/a/6870 I believe is more applicable.

Or from even well before LLMs -
Do I have to worry about copyright issues for code posted on Stack Overflow? https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/12527 (also linked from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25621815 )

It is legal and not a copyright violation to post GPL licensed code on Stack Overflow under the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license for purposes of education (without license attribution).

It is a GPL license / copyright violation to use the GPL licensed code that was posted to Stack (without license attribution) and use that in your code under the presumption that it was licensed under CC-BY-SA 4.0

There is no real difference in terms of copyright violation between copying GPL licensed code from Stack Overflow (which can be there) or code from Copilot - in either case, you, the human doing the copy and paste are the one doing the infringing and are responsible for ensuring that the province of the code that you are copying is free from any licensing encumbrances.

It is not a copyright violation for a radio (a machine) to play a song that it received from the airwaves. It is a copyright violation for you, the human, to take that radio and have it be a performance in the park where people can dance to the music on the radio played loudly.

Machines with no agency cannot infringe copyright. If I took a photo of a page of a book with my iPhone, and the iPhone did image to text on it, that's not the iPhone's fault. And I would possibly be within my rights to take that photo. I would be infringing if I then published that image or the text that the iPhone generated.

I believe / have the understanding that copyright can only be violated by an entity with agency - and some entity with agency is the one that ends up publishing or redistributing the work.

To that end, it doesn't matter if code was written by Copilot, copying from StackOverflow, or a random person on Fiver (who may or may not have used Copilot). If I publish it, I am the person with agency that infringed copyright.

If we say that "ahh, but you used Copilot - that was an infringement" ... ok, so I copied some unattributed code from Stack Overflow that I believed was CC-BY-SA. Is StackOverflow responsible for my accidental infringement? If the answer is "no, you - as the person pasting the code into your work - should always be checking the copyright province of unknown code you're pasting in" then I believe that same answer should applicable to all the other situations too.

https://www.synopsys.com/blogs/software-security/stack-overf...

https://opensource.com/law/13/7/fantec-german-foss-complianc...

> The court required Fantec to pay a contractual penalty in the amount of € 5,100 based on the prior settlement agreement. In addition, the court awarded the plaintiff’s expenses in enforcing the GPLv2. (This award is standard under German law and is based on Section 97a (1), 31, 69c no. 3 and 4 of the German Copyright Act which awards costs for a justified warning by a party which is so cautioned.) The court affirmed the culpability of Fantec’s violation by classifying the violation as negligent: the seller of firmware may not rely on suppliers'´statements about compliance. The distributor of GPLv2 software must carry out the assessment or commission experts to make the assessment even if they incurred additional costs.

https://fsfe.org/news/2013/news-20130626-01.en.html

> The court decided that FANTEC acted negligently: they would have had to ensure to distribute the software under the conditions of the GPLv2. The court made explicit that it is insufficient for FANTEC to rely on the assurance of license compliance of their suppliers. FANTEC itself is required to ascertain that no rights of third parties are violated.

It is the responsibility of the distributor to comply with the license.

In this light, it doesn't matter what Copilot "claims" about the license of code - the programmer copying the code is responsible for verifying its copyright status and is at fault if they publish that code.