Who owns the code Claude Code wrote? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#171

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

Arcuru wrote: post #115

Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable w…

but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent. When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code i…

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#172

Post by senaevren » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:12 PM UTC

freedomben wrote: post #123

senaevren wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the compa…

Very interesting, I had no idea. That's probably going to be a very painful lesson learned by all the startups that have been pumping out AI code. I know of several just among my peer groups that will be shocked and dismayed by this. Thanks for sharing that!

That is exactly the gap the piece is aimed at. The M&A conversation is where this becomes concrete very fast, and most founders shipping AI-assisted code have not had it yet.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#173

Post by atleastoptimal » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:14 PM UTC

mattmanser wrote: post #168

atleastoptimal wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise. I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like t…

Part of how AI works is that it's just really complicated compression, you can get AI to write out Harry Potter novels word for word with the right prompting. When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them. There's been instances…

Anthropic was sued successfully for training on books, the law still applies to them

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-...

When I write fizzbuzz do I owe royalties to the inventor of fizzbuzz? Is my brain copyright thieving because I can write out the song lyrics from memory?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#174

Post by gspr » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

I'm still flabbergasted that people – and big, visible companies with big targets on their backs – choose to keep on using the output of LLMs without having an answer to these questions.

And I'm worried that once that has been sufficiently normalized, laws and interpretations of them will adapt to whatever best suits those users. Which will mean copyrightwashing of FOSS. My only hope then is that surely if free software can be copyright-washed by the big guys, then so can the little guy copyright-wash the big guys' blockbuster movies or whatever, which might lead to some sort of reckoning.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#175

Post by vorticalbox » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

estimator7292 wrote: post #148

tensor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

Learning, probably not. Copy/pasting at scale , yes

It is learning though. It’s not just copying the code.

Code gets turned into tokens and then it learns the next most likely token.

The issue that I see most people talk about it the scale at which is learnt.

A human will learn from other people’s code but not from every persons code.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#176

Post by gspr » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:16 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

Arcuru wrote: post #115

Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable w…

but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent. When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code i…

> When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.

You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#177

Post by thesmtsolver2 » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:18 PM UTC

nadermx wrote: post #124

Arcuru wrote: post #115

Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable w…

Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act

[dead]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#178

Post by greensoap » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:22 PM UTC

semiquaver wrote: post #167

> The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection, and that rule is now settled at the highest judicial level available. Misstates the law. Denial of certiorari can happen for many reasons unrelated t…

Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#179

Post by NoMoreNicksLeft » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

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…

With sufficient obfuscation (which models seem to provide intrinsically), how would anyone know to sue? On top of that, only the most major sorts of litigation have the legal force to pierce even the flimsiest of obfuscation... this is likely all moot.

If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#180

Post by missingcolours » Tue, Apr 28, 2026, 7:23 PM UTC

CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

Arcuru wrote: post #115

Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable w…

but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP. I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent. When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code i…

In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time.

The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.

IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.