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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#3

Post by jhbadger »

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from public domain sources.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#4

Post by jugg1es »

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#5

Post by conartist6 »

jhbadger wrote: post #3

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…

I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.

Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#6

Post by brianwawok »

jhbadger wrote: post #3

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…

You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#7

Post by embedding-shape »

jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

Best part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#8

Post by bko »

This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution.

This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:

> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

    if (fromIndex > toIndex)

        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" +
fromIndex +

                                           ") > toIndex(" +
toIndex + ")");

    if (fromIndex  arrayLen)

        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}

And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#9

Post by FartyMcFarter »

jhbadger wrote: post #3

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…

The article addresses this explicitly:

> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection

Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.

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