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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#271

Post by leptons »

2ndorderthought wrote: post #227
rectang wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 d…

The only thing a vibe coder should be able to copyright, is the prompt text they wrote. Not the output of the LLM, only the text they wrote to instruct the LLM what to do. And even that is pretty iffy, because most of it like "put a button on a page" is not copyright-able.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#272

Post by CWuestefeld »

gspr wrote: post #176
CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I'm not sure where in our lawbooks there are laws that specifically target humans to the exclusion of human-operated tools.

There's also a TON of irony here. What an about face it is, for the community at large* to switch from "information wants to be free, we support copyleft and FOSS" to leaning so heavily on an incredibly conservative reading of IP law.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#273

Post by array_key_first »

tensor wrote: post #136
nadermx wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

The "learning" isn't learning really. I mean it might be, but if you define learning to be a human endeavor than AI can't learn.

It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#274

Post by thyrsus »

ottah wrote: post #114

My opinion, copyright has mattered very little in the corporate world. Copyright is effectively meaningless with SaaS, and the compiled software ran on your machine is protected more by technical controls and EULAs. A world where copyright didn't exist for software would look nearly the same for the commercial world. Trade secrets, NDAs, and employment contracts bind workers more than copyright. The only thing that t…

What is being licensed by the End User License Agreement (EULA) is the copyright on the code and its artefacts (executable bytes, etc.) - you can't have an EULA without having the copyright to license.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#275

Post by [deleted] »

freejazz wrote: post #266
reliablereason wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Claude is not a legal entity And? >It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone. No more ridiculous than you posting something you know nothing about. Just because you don't get the copyright doesn't mean claude does. The fact that claude is not a legal entity has no bearing on whether or not you are entitled to a copyright for a work you did not create.

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#277

Post by DrewADesign »

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…

But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#278

Post by array_key_first »

CamperBob2 wrote: post #108
senaevren wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire…

Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable. The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coi…

Of course it's relevant. How copyright infringement happens doesn't actually matter, all that matters is that the infringement happened.

If I painstakingly recreate A New Hope frame by frame, pixel by pixel, that's infringement. Even if I technically used 0 content from the original.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#279

Post by [deleted] »

pc86 wrote: post #206
jmaw wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see the argument for whoever paid for the tokens. Or in the case of a free AI usage, the person who sent the prompt (or whoever they are acting on behalf of, i.e. the company they are working for at the time). The primary issue being that it's all built on stolen data in the first place.

Even taking the least generous interpretation of what LLMs do and saying they're just "copy/pasting others' code" it's still not stealing because the original still exists and presumably still makes money. The original has to be gone for theft to have occurred. In order to have a sane conversation about this we have to all agree not to lie.

[deleted]
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