I don’t understand the author’s position in this article. It spends a long time talking about details of the licenses, but I can’t see any way the suit will actually be about licenses, because if it’s about licenses then it seems patently obvious to me that GitHub will lose very quickly, because they have undoubtedly violated the terms of the licenses.

As I see it, the only leg GitHub can possibly stand on is the “fair use” exemption of copyright law—that the license is irrelevant, because they weren’t using it under that license.

So then you get to the last paragraph of the article, and the “fair use” claim is finally mentioned—as something the plaintiffs seem to be seeking to avoid bringing into it because that would make things messy. But… GitHub’s defence must be “fair use”, I can see no other response. Yes, the plaintiffs “chose to focus on something that is beyond factual dispute”, but how are GitHub ever going to do anything other than bring fair use into it? So I don’t see how they could expect it to “still provide the same damages” without bringing fair use into it. (And I can’t imagine GitHub will settle for anything other that total vindication here—even settlement would doom Copilot.)

Returning to the title: I cannot imagine any way that We May Learn Something About Creative Commons Licensing from this suit. About the interactions between copyright law and machine learning, maybe. But about CC-*, GPL, Apache-2.0, MIT, whatever? Nah, there’s nothing interesting about them in the suit, because if they were involved, it’d be cut and dried.