There's one thing I'm missing from all these discussions and posts: is the generated code even copyrightable? IANAL, but code snippets often fall under the "scènes à faire" doctrine (everybody would do it in a similar way), in which case it's not. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sc%C3%A8nes_%C3%A0_faire
GitHub seems to think it is copyrightable, personally I doubt it is, simply because a human didn't create it and the process it was created by was automatic with no creativity.
Well, if the entire thing was generated, then no (according to the first link I posted above), since it was not produced by a human. However, no useful program is going to be entirely written by an AI, so any real program would have quite a lot of user input (I regularly will take what copilot suggests and then tweak it to what I specifically want). And then, yeah, it's copyrightable.
Also, there's no way for anyone to know what portion of code that I commit was hand written vs. generated, so you kind of have to treat it all as written by the committer anyway.
Though this does bring up interesting questions about what happens with things like automated PRs that fix bugs / update dependencies... are those then non-copyrightable? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Here's the kicker: your modified code snippet may still not be copyrightable if it's generic enough that everyone would do it in a similar manner.
Just as much as a hero riding off into the sunset is not copyrightable in a movie script. However, a hero riding off into the sunset with bananas in the pistol holsters would be.
This is what I would want to hear more about when discussing if Copilot violates copyright.
