People mostly concentrate on whether using Copilot might be a real copyright violation.<p>But the danger of being sued is a different question.<p>Consider the following scenario:<p>1) Company X has its product code stolen. Somebody puts it on GitHub. It's discovered and the code is removed.<p>2) You work on an open-source project which competes with that product of Company X, you use Copilot, and make it known.<p>3) Company X looks through your code and find fragments which look vaguely similar to fragments of their code.<p>4) They sue, claiming that you copied and obfuscated their code.<p>Were you not using Copilot, one line of defense for you would be that you never looked at the stolen code, never accessed it, so no copying took place.<p>With Copilot, this line of defense is not available to you, because Copilot "saw" that code and in principle that could help to produce the fragments in question. (Of course other lines of defense are still available).<p>Whether courts would accept this argument is a different question, but the argument is not obviously invalid, and Company X can cause enough trouble for you...