DeVault: GitHub Copilot and open source laundering

Emphasis on "legal" team, not engineering team. A lot of engineers have very strange ideas about how the GPL works. For example, some engineers (presumably not including DeVault) think that just reading GPL'd code causes it to magically "infect" any code you write after that point, which is not even close to being true.* The GPL attaches to derivative works. "Derivative work" is a legal term of art, and the license does not attempt to offer a definition for it, because it's defined by the underlying copyright law. That's why you need a team of lawyers, not a team of engineers, to evaluate something like this. In particular, I think DeVault's emphasis on the model itself being a derivative work may be an unnecessary distraction, because:

1. It's not clear to me whether this claim is actually correct. A model is ultimately "just" a big bag of statistical information, and I honestly don't know whether (US) copyright law attaches to such things in the first place, but I'm skeptical (see e.g. Feist v. Rural).
2. It's not relevant. What matters is whether the output of the model is a derivative work of the original, which is a completely different legal question. Derivative works are not subject to some sort of magical "transitive property" that requires the model to also be a derivative work; you can argue that the output is derivative while taking no position on the status of the model itself. Similarly, you could argue that the output is *not* derivative, again taking no position on the model. The status of the model is not relevant to the question, unless you're going to allege an AGPL** violation.

* The kernel of truth here is that, in practice, clean-room engineering is often a good idea for the avoidance of legal risk. But there's nothing in either the GPL or the copyright statute that says you have to do it. Because that would be stupid. Imagine if novelists couldn't read books without running into copyright issues.
** The AGPL is the only widely-used license whose obligations attach on creation of a derivative work, rather than on distribution of that work. As far as I know, GitHub has no intention of distributing the model itself to anyone, so if you want to sue GitHub just for creating the model, you'd have to claim an AGPL violation specifically.