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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#91

Post by beej71 »

senaevren wrote: post #71
daishi55 wrote: post #36

I’m no lawyer but I feel that meta, my employer, wouldn’t be letting us go hog-wild with Claude code if they weren’t completely confident that they fully owned the outputs, whether we change it or not.

Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap i…

I don't understand how a company can have IP copyright rights on code that is inherently uncopyrightable (in the unlikely event scotus rules that way).

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#92

Post by _flux »

yodon wrote: post #37
_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 copy…

Let's say we didn't have assemblers, but instead we would have three professions:

- Specifiers, who make the specification for the system

- Programmers, who write C code

- Machine encoders, that take that C code and write machine code for a CPU

Would it be that the copyright would then belong to programmers, if no other explicit assignments would be made?

---

Thinking about it, probably yes: copyright of the spec belongs to specifies, copyright of the C belong to programmers, and copyright of machine code to machine encoders. Or would it depend on the amount of optimizations the machine encoders would do, i.e. is it creative or not? And then does this relate to the task and copyrightability of C compiler output, where optimizations can sometimes surprise the developer?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#93

Post by jhbadger »

6stringmerc wrote: post #75
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…

Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.

My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to text. I suspect Winters and his publisher have investigated the legality of this more than either of us have.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#94

Post by sarchertech »

beej71 wrote: post #87
sarchertech wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.

IANAL but this sounds more like trademark territory.

You can also trademark a character if it’s used as a brand identifier in commerce.

There are far more characters protected by copyright than trademark.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#95

Post by kk_mors »

_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.

[dead]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#96

Post by e12e »

embedding-shape wrote: post #31
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.

> books they bought and destroyed (legal)

They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents?

AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#97

Post by embedding-shape »

e12e wrote: post #96
embedding-shape wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> books they bought and destroyed (legal) They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents? AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?

> They're only legal if training is fair use

The judge seems to have said it's because they "transformed" the books (destroying them after digitalizing) in the process, that made it legal.

> Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital files internally rather than distributing them. The judge compared the process to “conserv[ing] space” through format conversion and found it transformative. - https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/06/anthropic-destroyed-milli...

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#98

Post by metalcrow »

"if Claude was trained on the LGPL-licensed codebase and its output reflects patterns learned from that code, can the output be treated as license-free? The emerging legal consensus is probably not, and assuming it can creates significant liability for anyone shipping that code commercially."

Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#100

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

metalcrow wrote: post #98

"if Claude was trained on the LGPL-licensed codebase and its output reflects patterns learned from that code, can the output be treated as license-free? The emerging legal consensus is probably not, and assuming it can creates significant liability for anyone shipping that code commercially." Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of ye…

This sounds like a problem that's pretty easy to get around.

CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around.

And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training.

It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce.

It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you took any precautions to make it even slightly difficult that you did.

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