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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#251

Post by red75prime »

cogman10 wrote: post #182
vorticalbox wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video. Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept.…

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense.

And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#252

Post by reliablereason »

freejazz wrote: post #240
reliablereason wrote: post #239

This is like asking: "Who owns the text microsoft word helped you write?" Claude code is a software tool not a legal entity.

Not if claude does the writing. MS doesn't write things for you, and if it did, you would not be entitled to a copyright in whatever it wrote for you.

Claude is not a legal entity, it is a software tool that outputs text based on statistics. There is a user that used a tool to create text and that user is the legal entity responsible for the text in any legal way that matters.

Anything else would be completely ridiculous given current laws in most countries.

It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#253

Post by pocksuppet »

sarchertech wrote: post #234
adrian_b wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid. So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid. If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid. The open source licenses are intended as de…

Yes. “ Copyright Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject…

MIT just disclaims all the author's rights except attribution. If it turns out the code isn't copyrightable, nothing really changes. A better example would be GPL.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#254

Post by jacquesm »

Aerroon wrote: post #229
jacquesm wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief.

Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the content of that book, regardless of whether or not I hold the copyright to it. Conversely, if the original author sues because they feel their work infringes then that too is a liability that stems from the distribution.

And 'distribution' is a pretty wide term, not unlike 'interstate commerce', lots of things that you might not consider to be distribution can be classified as such in court.

Different laws do not come in packages, they apply individually, and sometimes they apply collectively but it isn't a menu where you can pick the combination that you think makes the most sense.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#255

Post by pocksuppet »

everforward wrote: post #184
_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.

Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative. Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They…

Fine then that's not copyrightable at all. Just like hello world isn't copyrightable, whether in source form or compiled form.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#256

Post by jacquesm »

teddyh wrote: post #243
Aerroon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you hold an illegal party on public land, you would still be liable, even though you did not own the land.

In some places simply not keeping the public street in front of property ice-free can incur liability, even when you are not actually there when it snows. There are so many such examples I'm kind of surprised to see this kind of confused argument made here.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#257

Post by cogman10 »

red75prime wrote: post #251
cogman10 wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is that of copyright law WRT to derivative works. Machine transformations on original works does not create a new copyright for the person that directed the machine transformation. That's why you can't pirate a bunch of media by simply adding a red pixel to the righthand corner or by color shifting the video. Copyright law is very clear that if a machine does it, the original copyright on the input is kept.…

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense. And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have m…

> Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored?

Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content.

The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a copyright is void simply because of a fair use claim.

> And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression.

That doesn't matter. Why would it? If I take a FLAC recording and change it to an MP3. The fact that it was a lossy transform doesn't suddenly give me the legal right to distribute the MP3.

> Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have made it into the final weights.

That's what the NYT v. OpenAI lawsuit is all about. And for earlier models they could, in fact, pull out full NYT articles which proved they made it into the final weights.

Further, the NYT is currently in discovery which means OpenAI must open up to the NYT what goes into their weights. A move that, if OpenAI loses, other litigants can also use because there's a real good shot that OpenAI also included their works in the dataset.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#258

Post by senaevren »

dang wrote: post #246

Could you please stop posting generated comments to HN? It's not allowed here, and it looks like you've done it over 30 times already. (Of course, there's no way to be certain of this, but it's what our software thinks, and the overall pattern is pretty convincing.) See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

You are definitely right to flag it, apologize for that. I used an AI assistant for the replies, and I will make sure not to use one going forward.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#259

Post by red75prime »

cogman10 wrote: post #257
red75prime wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shredding is a machine transformation. Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored and the provenance can't be traced? Just an example that treating all machine transformations equally with no regard to the specifics doesn't make much sense. And the specifics of autoregressive pretraining is that it is lossy compression. Good luck finding which copyrighted materials have m…

> Does it mean that shreds retain original copyright even if the content can't be restored? Yup, it absolutely does. In fact, that's why you are still violating copyright law by using bittorrent even though each of the users is only giving out a small slice or shred of the original content. The US has a granted defense in the case of something like shredding called "Fair Use" but that doesn't mean or imply that a cop…

> Yup, it absolutely does

Well, it's not the first time when the law contradicts laws of nature (for the entertainment of the future generations). Bittorent is not a relevant example, because the system is designed to restore the work in its fullness.

> in fact, pull out full NYT articles

That's when they used their knowledge of the exact text they wanted to "retrieve" to get the text? It wouldn't be so efficient with a random number generator, but it's doable.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#260

Post by p0w3n3d »

bearjaws wrote: post #43
p0w3n3d wrote: post #40

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…

I rarely see #3 yield better solutions, it's usually better to collaborate as a team on requirements and gotchas, but let one person own implementation.

But both backend and front-end? Do everyone have to be full stack?
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