What if instead of Copilot, it was a bunch of humans who were searching all the source code they could access and then copying/autocompleting that code, regardless of the license.
A paid service where tens of hundreds of people search for publicly available code snippets and send them to you? I believe they call that outsourcing in some circles.
In this case we'd be sending subpoenas to those people to make sure they hadn't been instructed to disregard licenses or copy large pieces of code verbatim.
Why not make the a ology the other way. If I put massive amounts of code into a database and develop some sort of query language that spits out various parts of the contents of the database based on the query am I covered by fair use?