Class action against GitHub Copilot

For 1, it's not about the naysayers, it's about what you can say in court to convince a judge (or jury in some US civil cases) that the naysayers are overreacting. The statement "we trained this against our crown jewels, the Windows and Office codebases, because we are completely certain that its output cannot contain enough of our original code to infringe copyright" is a very convincing statement to a judge or jury - and even if the court finds that Copilot engages in contributory infringement of people's copyright (having seen a demo of it doing so), the court is likely to be lenient on Microsoft as a result - the fact of having trained it against their core business codebases is helpful evidence that any infringement by Copilot's output is unintentional and something Microsoft would fix, because it puts their core business at risk.

And for 2, which part do you want a citation on? That Office and Windows are a big Win32 codebase written by good developers? That people still write code for Win32? That there's boilerplate in Win32 that would be simplified with an AI assistant helping you write the code?