On piracy, HN users defend Sci-Hub to protest against the academic publishing industry, which involves large corporations such as Elsevier charging publishing and subscription fees that are much more than the value that these corporations bring to the actual research, review, and publication. Academics need to publish in order to survive, and they individually do not have enough power to subvert the existing academic publishing system. Since academics do not receive royalties, Sci-Hub enables academics to pay less into the same system that exploits them for profit. By supporting Sci-Hub, HN users take a populist stance by supporting individuals against the system.
The situation with Microsoft and Copilot is the exact opposite. Here, Microsoft is misusing its acquisition of GitHub to repackage the work of individual free and open source contributors into a proprietary product in violation of the authors' software licenses. These licenses do not even require Microsoft to pay. They only require attribution and redistribution under a compatible license. Supporting Microsoft's misuse of GitHub is an anti-populist stance that puts the interests of the corporation over the interests of the individuals.
The argument for libgen is that whatever damage there is to the authors missing out on revenues is outweighed by people being able to get books that they otherwise wouldn’t be able to afford (especially in developing countries).
In the case of copilot, the damage suffered by the authors is close to zero. And those who benefit the most are the authors themselves. A double digit percent productivity enhancement is worth more to me than a few million $ to a trillion dollar company, especially because MS has to pay for compute.
You're assuming that Microsoft needs to shut down Copilot to comply with the licenses of the software they misused. That is not the case. To make Copilot legitimate, all Microsoft has to do is restrict Copilot's inputs to non-proprietary code, release the Copilot dataset under a compatible license, and clarify that the code generated by Copilot is also covered under that license. Attribution can be done by inserting a comment with link to a paginated list of all of the contributors whose code was used in Copilot.
Microsoft can even continue to sell Copilot as a service while keeping it license-compliant, since most developers are not going to self-host the entire dataset. Microsoft can also choose to exclude copyleft-licensed code from Copilot or create multiple flavors of Copilot, each licensed differently. You can get your "productivity enhancement" without needing Microsoft to violate software licenses.
The damage is not in the monetary payment denied to free and open source software contributors, payment these contributors never demanded. The damage is in Microsoft violating other people's software licenses to create a proprietary product derived from copyleft-licensed and attribution-required code, and in Microsoft encouraging other developers to violate these licenses. Microsoft needs to rectify these violations with specific performance.
The situation with Microsoft and Copilot is the exact opposite. Here, Microsoft is misusing its acquisition of GitHub to repackage the work of individual free and open source contributors into a proprietary product in violation of the authors' software licenses. These licenses do not even require Microsoft to pay. They only require attribution and redistribution under a compatible license. Supporting Microsoft's misuse of GitHub is an anti-populist stance that puts the interests of the corporation over the interests of the individuals.