Licensing controversy
Edit
Although most code output by Copilot can be classified as a transformative work, GitHub admits that a small proportion is copied verbatim, which has led to fears that the output code is insufficiently transformative to be classified as fair use and may infringe on the copyright of the original owner.[2] This leaves Copilot on untested legal ground, although GitHub states that "training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community".[2] The company has also stated that as of June 2022 only a few source codes are taken over completely or partially unchanged. Therefore as the software continues to learn, this figure is expected to drop.[16] Also in June 2022, the Software Freedom Conservancy announced it would end all uses of GitHub in its own projects,[17] accusing Copilot of ignoring code licenses used in training data.[18]