IANAL, but it's pretty clear that GH explicitly says they will NOT distribute the code. I'm not sure what else you'd call offering to copy a section of code.
"It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service."
Throughout the license, the Content is treated as an indivisible unit, and it specifically refers to the forking functionality. Notice that forking...forks an entire repository, licenses included, etc. You can't fork a single file, and you can't fork a region of a file. GH provides that kind of forking.
Copilot is fine-grained forking.
No significant software company is going to permit copilot to be used and potentially poison their code base in unknown ways, now that this kind of copying is in the open and is clearly a significant danger.
Somebody like Black Duck is going to make a lot of money for trial attorneys by tracing how code was created and finding the "hits". That will be joined with log data indicating who used copilot, when they used it, and exactly what copilot presented as the "hit". This entire process will be performed recursively on the "hit", together with classic source analysis, to find out where something is really from.
The bigger companies are really, really serious about not copying outside code except under really strict conditions -- these conditions mostly look like "no you may not, unless you have one of these specific situations". It's no-by-default, even when it looks like it could be a yes.
Once someone uses copilot they now have code fragments outside GH and stripped of attribution and license. Looks like GH is trying to say these users need to do their own IP vetting. Which seems very impractical for anyone, even the creators of GH copilot.
"It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service."
Throughout the license, the Content is treated as an indivisible unit, and it specifically refers to the forking functionality. Notice that forking...forks an entire repository, licenses included, etc. You can't fork a single file, and you can't fork a region of a file. GH provides that kind of forking.
Copilot is fine-grained forking.
No significant software company is going to permit copilot to be used and potentially poison their code base in unknown ways, now that this kind of copying is in the open and is clearly a significant danger.
Somebody like Black Duck is going to make a lot of money for trial attorneys by tracing how code was created and finding the "hits". That will be joined with log data indicating who used copilot, when they used it, and exactly what copilot presented as the "hit". This entire process will be performed recursively on the "hit", together with classic source analysis, to find out where something is really from.
The bigger companies are really, really serious about not copying outside code except under really strict conditions -- these conditions mostly look like "no you may not, unless you have one of these specific situations". It's no-by-default, even when it looks like it could be a yes.