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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?

#31

Post by embedding-shape »

e12e wrote: post #28

Seems to gloss over other kinds of contamination, beyond GPL code. Code from pirated text books, the problem with the entire language model being trained on copyright data, and on the possibility of the training data containing various copyrighted code.

> Code from pirated text books

Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#32

Post by mathgeek »

brianwawok wrote: post #6
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.

You're forgetting that you need coffee/tea/mate to fuel the button pushers. The Jetsons predicted this decades ago.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#33

Post by [deleted] »

croes wrote: post #14
bko wrote: post #8

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 vin…

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation? Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#34

Post by Rietty »

bko wrote: post #8

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 vin…

Why were the HFT firms suing employees?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#35

Post by gchamonlive »

brianwawok wrote: post #6
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.

AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#37

Post by yodon »

_flux wrote: post #21

I think it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input. After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.

>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.

If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#38

Post by smashed »

conartist6 wrote: post #18
smashed wrote: post #13

The "if you generated the code at work using company tools, it's owned by your employer" affirmation in the article makes no sense to me? If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.

It is copyrightable. A *human* can copyright code they wrote.

I meant in the sense that the "tool" is an LLM and the "work" was vibe coded.

If vibe coded work is not copyrightable, it cannot be reassigned to the employer and become copyright protected.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#39

Post by bearjaws »

Article is incredibly fear mongering.

Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.

Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.

In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.

Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.

Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?

Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.

Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#40

Post by p0w3n3d »

That's quite impressive approach from the companies' perspective. Let's first use claude code and then we'll think who the code belongs to.

I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people.

First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code.

Second - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.

Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.

Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.

I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.

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