I would imagine there must also be some aspect of uniqueness to it as well for even recognizing where a line of code came from… otherwise almost every Python script might have copied this line from a GPL licensed program:

`if __name__ == "__main__":`

I have no idea where that line first appeared, so figuring out what license it was originally written under would be difficult to track down, and most software only has license info at the file rather than line level.

It could be. The amount of code you copy doesn't matter, just depends on context and if your work could now be considered derivative.

I said this else where, but I work with people who won't even look at GPL code because of the potential legal entanglements.

Yes let's. Corporations with billions of dollars behind them whole sale stole copy right work and licenced code to train models, and then turned around and sold the result with no attribution or monetary benefit given to the people they stole from. They knew what they were doing and relied on the legal system being slow enough that they could plant a flag in the market before legal challenges killed them.

It's an industry built on theft. By all rights they should have been sued/fined out of existence before it ever got this far. But if you have enough money you can make almost anything legal.

If you genuinely believe that you are not above a literal text completion algorithm and do not deserve any more rights than it, that says more about you than anything else.