Admittedly, I come from more of a hardware background, and it has been a tradition going back at least a century, of people publishing DIY construction plans that they expected others to duplicate. Likewise in science, a published paper was supposed to provide enough information for a skilled person to reproduce the work. Also copyrights didn't readily apply to hardware, and things like electronic circuits were actually quite hard to patent.

Maybe life was a little bit simpler in some ways back then. Things that are now being hashed out regarding usage rights in the software world, were taken for granted in the early hobby and scientific communities.

My understanding of the Copilot issue is that it's hard to know the legality of using the code provided by the tool.