What’s the point of licenses if TOS overrides it?
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...
I'm actually surprised they allowed Copilot to happen, given this section:
> This license does not grant GitHub the right to sell Your Content. It also does not grant GitHub the right to otherwise distribute or use Your Content outside of our provision of the Service, except that as part of the right to archive Your Content, GitHub may permit our partners to store and archive Your Content in public repositories in connection with the GitHub Arctic Code Vault and GitHub Archive Program.
One could make the argument they had no intrinsic right to use the software for Copilot except under the terms laid out under the respective softwares' licenses. This means any GPL code they copied by error is now in violation of the GPL by default. But IANAL.
edit: The exact quote was “Training machine learning models on publicly available data is considered fair use across the machine learning community” if you want to search for it.
edit 2: https://web.archive.org/web/20210629142841/http://copilot.gi...
> Frequently Asked Questions -> Training Set -> Why was GitHub Copilot trained on data from publicly available sources?
> Training machine learning models on publicly available data is now common practice across the machine learning community. The models gain insight and accuracy from the public collective intelligence. But this is a new space, and we are keen to engage in a discussion with developers on these topics and lead the industry in setting appropriate standards for training AI models.
You have apparently misunderstood copyright licenses as being something that attaches to a copyrighted work and now must be respected by all users of that work. But that is totally incorrect.
Licenses are individual agreements between copyright holders (or licensees who have been granted the right to re-license) and people who want to exercise one of the rights normally withheld under copyright. A LICENSE file is nothing but an offer to grant a license with specified terms to anyone who might want to use the work, without having to nag the licensor to sign an agreement. The existence of that offer doesn't have anything to do with any other agreement the licensor and a (potential) licensee might make.
In the GitHub case, GitHub has negotiated a different license with the uploader. (That negotiation happened to take the form of a ToS, which is another kind of binding offer.) The LICENSE file has nothing to do with it. It hasn't been overridden, it's just irrelevant. It doesn't add or subtract any terms from the separate and distinct license GitHub negotiated.
Other parties will still have to abide by your license.