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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#221

Post by jacquesm »

keithba wrote: post #209
jacquesm wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you are wrong about this. See: https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-out... If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs. The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally…

In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code). Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always)…

If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off.

The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you make them out to be. Until there is a ruling that clearly establishes that the person that generated the prompt owns the copyright on the code I think it is misleading to suggest that this is already the case, your lawyers are not the lawyers of the parties that will end up hurt if it ends up not being so.

For contrast: we have a very clear idea on what things are copyrighted and in general these things do not rest on a foundation of IP appropriated from others outside of the license terms. The fact that the infringement is fine grained and effectively harms the rights of 1000s or more individuals doesn't change the heart of the matter, whoever wrote the code: it wasn't you.

Given your bias I'm not surprised that this would be your argument though, effectively you have created a copyright laundromat using code that you were nominally the steward of and not the owner but whether it stands long term or not is not up to your lawyers.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#223

Post by mock-possum »

heikkilevanto wrote: post #207

Ownership is one question. IMO, a more interesting question is who is responsible when the code does some real-life damage.

Why should it be any different than it ever was? If a release manager checked it but didn’t catch the vulnerability, they have some culpability. If the developer shipped the code without checking it, they have some culpability too. Ultimately, if they both work under an organization that they report to, they’re responsible to that organization, which is, in turn, accountable to its customers (and investors perhaps.)

LLMs really change nothing about this.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#224

Post by idle_zealot »

boh wrote: post #216
tensor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows". The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

> The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

It's only exhausting if you think copyright ever reasonably settled the matter of ownership of knowledge and want to morally justify an incoherent set of outcomes that they personally favor. In practice it's primarily been a tool for the powerful party in any dispute to hammer others for disrupting their business model. I think that's pretty much the only way attempting to apply ownership semantics to knowledge or information can end up.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#225

Post by blks »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #173
mattmanser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think if you write fizzbuzz and then sell it, without attribution, and it goes against the original fizzbuzz license, then you’re infringing.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#226

Post by semiquaver »

jmyeet wrote: post #192
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…

The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position. Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court. Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other…

  > The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position.
No it is not.

  > “The denial of a writ of certiorari imports no expression of opinion upon the merits of the case, as the bar has been told many times.”
United States v. Carver, 260 U. S. 482, 490 (1923).

Moreover, SCOTUS does not decide issues, they decide cases.

  > “We are acutely aware, however, that we sit to decide concrete cases, and not abstract propositions of law.”
Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U. S. 383, 386 (1981).

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#227

Post by 2ndorderthought »

rectang wrote: post #183
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…

Copyright laundering is an illusion. If the LLM generates output that a court decides is sufficiently derivative, and especially (but not necessarily) if the LLM was trained on the source material being infringed, then whoever redistributes the derivative output is going to be liable for copyright infringement. Creation of the LLM itself is transformative, but LLM output which infringes is not.

Is it true then that if someone stole an entire code base from a vibe coded app from a non permissively licensed project and that person claimed that it was derived from an LLM and was not stolen at all that the person who stole the code is not a thief because it came from the same place? Or are they a thief because someone else copyrighted it? How do vibe coders protect themselves not knowing who else has the same derivative code or who holds the copyright first? Or can't they?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#228

Post by keithba »

jacquesm wrote: post #221
keithba wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code). Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always)…

If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off. The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you ma…

Obviously, we aren’t going to agree on this at all. I hope you have a good day.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#229

Post by Aerroon »

jacquesm wrote: post #198
Aerroon wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's making a point about responsibility/liability. If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output. Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).

Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.

The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author:

https://www.copyright.gov/ai/

>The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output.

If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#230

Post by [deleted] »

TheFirstNubian wrote: post #195
senaevren wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The meaningful human authorship question is the elephant, agreed, and the regulators have deliberately refused to quantify it for exactly the reason you describe any bright line number becomes a target to game rather than a standard to meet. The logging point is sharper than it might appear. In a copyright dispute over AI-assisted code, interaction logs could cut both ways. A plaintiff trying to establish human autho…

The bit about treating one’s prompt history as a legal document has really struck a nerve with me. I’ve been keeping a separate git history solely for my prompts. Initially, the goals were simple: reuse prompts, turn some into skills, etc. But in light of the insights from the article and the discussions here, I need to treat this practice as serious business.

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