I have yet to see a legal argument that says the output of ChatGPT is free from derivative works claims. So you can't assert ownership of the output, but that doesn't mean someone else can't assert rights on the grounds of derivative works.
It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.
I doubt many codebases are 100% generated by Copilot with no human input, and it’s not like having some Copilot snippets in your code is going to invalidate the copyright on the whole thing… I think that’s like being worried that writing parts of a book in a public domain font is going to invalidate the copyright on it
The copying verbatim thing is valid though, although they have mitigations against that
It is one of the reasons I don't see Copilot going anywhere. Any company that uses it can't assert ownership over their own IP, and if Copilot accidently reproduces a chunk of training data verbatim then someone else can.