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Copying a few lines is not the same as copying the whole thing. Sharing quotes from a book is not copyright infringement.
Using clips from a movie in a movie review is probably fair use.
Using clips from a movie in knock-off of that movie for profit? Probably not fair use if it's not a parody.
Copilot is not like a movie reviewer using clips to review a movie. Copilot is like a production team for a movie taking clips from another movie to make a ripoff of that movie and selling it.
Consider every repo on github to be a movie. Copilot is taking individual frames out of every movie on github and composting them into a new film.
I think most of us would agree that individually, each frame is copyrighted. But what if you take one frame from a million different movies and put them in an order that produces a new coherent movie?
The core question we need to settle in court is: does the new movie become its own copyrightable work, or is it plagiarism?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sampling_(music)#Legal_and_eth...
I.e. any use without permission is illegal.
Copilot is fair use and transformative -- that is unless there is an open source Copilot that Copilot is training on, only then would it be competing and it's easy for GitHub or OpenAI to exclude those repos of copilot alternatives from the training set.
I can't think of a 5 line snippet I've written or read that makes sense to claim ownership of. They don't stand on their own in the way even a 30s movie clip does.
It is if I take those quotes and publish them as my own in my own book.
