It's self-serving hypocrisy when programmers argue for a very strict reading of copyright for their own works (source code) while at the same time arguing for unbounded sharing of other people's works (books and papers).

If you agree with libgen and scihub then you should definitely not see anything wrong with copilot, because what copilot is doing is considerably milder, they are not reproducing anybody's works.

If you disagree with libgen and scihub because they are illegal only then can the argument that copilot is infringing be made.

> It's self-serving hypocrisy when programmers argue for a very strict reading of copyright for their own works (source code) while at the same time arguing for unbounded sharing of other people's works (books and papers).

Yes, if those were the only two things being discussed, it would be.

But almost all of these people think a certain amount of copyright for songs and movies is good too. And I bet a vast majority of them support copyright for books too, or at least most books.

The vast majority of research authors want their work to be freely available. The industry is just organized in a way that prevents that from happening without harming your research career.