You are conflating copyright and plagiarism rules at school. Copyright stems from the copyright act, plaigarism rules stem from the academic code of conduct. Any similarity between the two is coincidental. What a teacher can accept or not accept has nothing to do with copyright.
And nobody is ever in "legal trouble" for a copyright violation in a typical school assignment... because unless the student work is publically published, the owner of the copyright is never going to know what you turned into your teacher. It's a tree falling in the forest, with nobody present to hear it.
Different countries go by different laws I guess. Here in France the rule is "no plagiarism", and even if there is no legal definition of "plagiarism", the usual definition is "you must submit your own work and, when using something that is not your own work, you must quote it correctly."
If I'm asking you "write a program that solves this problem", or "write an essay about that topic", you can certainly find a solution online that has a very permissive licence letting you use it any way you want. Good for you, but that's still not your own work and will potentially put you in deep trouble if you use it. Ditto with anything produced by ChatGPT: not your work. You don't own that. You can write "according to ChatGPT, ..." (although you probably won't impress the teacher with that), or you can get inspiration from the output to produce your own work, but not use it as is and pretend you did it.
> And nobody is ever in "legal trouble" for a copyright violation in a typical school assignment... because unless the student work is publically published, the owner of the copyright is never going to know what you turned into your teacher.
Many univs automatically runs a plagiarism-checker on anything submitted by students. Sometimes one of them gets caught. In France, that's enough to be, worse case scenario (although that rarely happens), banned from taking any public exam or work for the government, for your whole life.
I'm not disagreeing with what you just wrote, but I am pointing out plagiarism and copyright violations are not the same thing. Any similarity is coincidental.
Consider a film student who uses a modern pop song without permission in their student film, which they credit in the movie credits. No plagiarism has occurred-- but they did violate the copyright of the band's publisher.
Consider a student who finds an essay written in 1893 and passes the words in the essay off as their own- plagiarism has occurred but there is no copyright violation as works from 1893 are public domain.
And nobody is ever in "legal trouble" for a copyright violation in a typical school assignment... because unless the student work is publically published, the owner of the copyright is never going to know what you turned into your teacher. It's a tree falling in the forest, with nobody present to hear it.