You can't copyright a mathematical operation. Only a particular implementation of it, and even then it may not be copyrightable if its a straightforward and obvious implementation.
That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves.
However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made.
Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.
Not sure where you thought I said you could copyright a mathematical operation, I was clearly referring to the implementation due to the mention of “quake”.
When it was reported, I was able to reproduce it myself.
GPT4 regurgitated almost full NYT articles verbatim. It's strange that this lawsuit seems to be so amateurish that they failed to properly demonstrate the reproduction. Though of course it might require a lot of legal technicalities that we naively think are trivial but they might be not.
Absolutely there were a few outliers where a judge might want to look more closely. I'd be surprised if -under scrutiny- there wouldn't be any issues whatsoever that OpenAI overlooked.
However, it seemed to me that over half of the NYT complaints were examples of using the -then rather new- ChatGPT web browsing feature to browse their own website. In the case, they then claimed surprise when it did just what you'd expect a web browsing feature to do.
The second step is to remove from consideration aspects of the program which are not legally protectable by copyright. The analysis is done at each level of abstraction identified in the previous step. The court identifies three factors to consider during this step: elements dictated by efficiency, elements dictated by external factors, and elements taken from the public domain.
All the plaintiffs would need to do is provide evidence that copywritten code was produced verbatim. This includes showing the copyrighted code on GitHub, showing copilot reproducing the code (including how you manipulated copilot to do it), showing that they match, and showing that the setting to turn off reproduction of public code is set.
It makes no difference who owns the copyrighted code, it need only be shown that copilot is violating copyright. Microsoft can't say "uhh that doesn't count" or whatever simply because they own a company that owns a company that owns copyright on the code.
That said the implementation doesn't appear to be totally trivial and copilot apparently even copies the comments which are almost certainly copyrightable in themselves.
https://x.com/StefanKarpinski/status/1410971061181681674 https://github.com/id-Software/Quake-III-Arena/blob/dbe4ddb1...
However a twitter post on its own isn't evidence a court will accept. You would need the original poster to testify that what is seen in the post is actually what he got from copilot and not just a meme or joke that he made.
Also the plaintiffs in this case don't include id-Software and there is some evidence that id-Software actually stole the fast inverse sqrt code from 3dfx so they might not want to bring a claim here anyways.