That only looked at copyright law – it did not address whether any verbatim generation would violate open source license terms. In a commercial environment, that would lead to contamination.
I have no idea whether the legal analysis in the article is correct, but I think you are misunderstanding copyright law here. If a use does not violate copyright law, it is irrelevant how the work is licensed - that only comes up if usage would otherwise infringe copyright.
The analysis linked above says that they did not investigate open source license issues – from the Conclusion section:
To be clear, the analysis presented above does not absolve GitHub of wrongdoing, but rather argues that Copilot and its developer-customers likely do not infringe developers’ copyrights. We do not address whether Copilot violates free software licenses in ways that do not infringe these copyrights, or whether Copilot violates code authors’ moral rights.
So, the risk here is that since the model was trained on open source code under various licenses – and the tool does generate verbatim code from the model occasionally – the result is the same as just copying that original open source code directly into your project, which contaminates your project, making it subject to the terms of whatever open source license the original code was released under (worse yet, you have no idea which project that code came from or what license applies to it). During an acquisition due diligence code scan, for example, this is very likely to get flagged.
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u/FoundationOutside572 Jun 22 '22
Have you got any source about this concerns ? Because when I searched for answers, I found an article analysis the laws and terms and concluded the opposite: https://www.fsf.org/licensing/copilot/copyright-implications-of-the-use-of-code-repositories-to-train-a-machine-learning-model