Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

381–390 of 570 posts

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#381

Post by balamatom »

idle_zealot wrote: post #224
boh wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Correct.

Knowledge consists of, roughly speaking, thoughts.

(a "justified true belief" - per https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/ - is a kind of thought)

The "thinking" part of a "thinking being" - that also consists of thoughts.

If your knowledges are someone's property, you are someone's property.

A society where all knowledge is proprietary, is a society of ubiquitous slavery.

Maybe multi-layered, maybe fractional, maybe with a smiley-face drawn on top.

Doesn't matter.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#382

Post by p_l »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #349
KallDrexx wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason? The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio... ) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work. The auth…

Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.

Copyright works on derivative rules - is the component of the work unmistakenly derived from another copyrighted work.

Under at least EU AI Act, any work done by AI is not granted copyright. But it does not mean copyright does not apply, it means the amount of work credited to AI is set at 0% (simplification). A human working off another's work unless it's perfect copy will have "credit" for changes that are judged creative/transformative, meaning a human plagiarizing something still can claim to have some degree of authorship. An AI won't.

In a sense, the copyright status of final work is a sort of "sum with dilution" were each work involved adds to claims, but AI's output is set at 0 - the prompt or further rework by human is not.

As for employer, details vary but generally "work for hire" rules and contracts do reassignment of material rights (in EU and some other places you can not reassign moral rights which are a different thing).

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#383

Post by imafish »

green_wheel wrote: post #343
senaevren wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why do you use an AI assistant for the replies?

My guess is she wants to respond to all feedback and questions but doesn't have time to do it all by hand.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#384

Post by p_l »

demorro wrote: post #247
idle_zealot wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I get the individual/corporation distinction, but how is a machine another tier here? It's a tool, it can't have any rights at all. The wielder has rights, and curtailing their rights depending on what tool they're using to exercise them seems strange. Potentially justifiable, but it's a different axis from the nature of the actor.

Our positions are completely compatible. People are anthropomorphizing LLMs, saying that because humans train on protected works, then it is fine for LLMs to do the same. If they have only the rights that their human creators have, then access to them cannot be sold, in the exact same way that I cannot sell you a database that I have collected filled with copyrighted material. The "humans do training too" argument on…

Thing is, LLMs level of compression of training set mean that effectively, under the same rules that say you cannot sell that database filled with copyright material, the LLM is fine to sell. Because you have to be able to meaningfully trace each claim to final output (weights). For example, for some older stable diffusion model, it was calculated that each individual work addition or removal resulted in about 1-2 bits of change, meaning the same rules would qualify it as not derivative work.

However, because it is an issue with (at least historical) goals of copyright law, the common pattern that is evolving is that AI is not granted copyright of any work it generates, making it a bit of poison pill for some of the egregious ideas of corporate abuse. Not sure if the weights will be considered copyrightable either.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#385

Post by p_l »

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?

We did not grant human exemptions in copyright law.

We gave certain temporary monopoly on certain uses to humans under rules little understood by laymen even if their livelihood depends on it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#386

Post by p_l »

alok-g wrote: post #373
jacquesm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another, the kind of thing that has been ruled copyrightable since copyright exists. The same goes for translations from one human language into another, and anybody with knowledge of more than one language will be happy to acknowledge that trans…

>> No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product. I think I may have misunderstood your original comment above. It seems intending to say: No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not necessarily on the work product. The human may partially have copyright over the work product as well, "how much" being dependent on how much new creative expression from the human was involved vs that…

That is in fact correct.

Both the compiler (in absence of inclusion of copyrighted libraries) and the LLM are considered to not add creative work and thus do not change copyright status of the works they transform.

You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries and the level of copyright from them applying to final output to be how much can be directly considered derivative, just as reading copyrighted code and being inspired by it does not pass that copyright to your work unless it's obviously derivative

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#387

Post by chrisred »

Animats wrote: post #379
KallDrexx wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason? The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio... ) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work. The auth…

> only humans can be granted copyright. No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.

However, until very recently the creative product must have been created by someone so there is an implicitly created copyright over the product in the first place. With AI output, that might not continue to be true, we don't really know how it'll work out yet.

In any case, the corporation did not create the product, people created it and their contractual relationship with the corporation defined how the ownership of that work was managed. So, I don't find it too unusual that this element of personhood is available to corporations.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#388

Post by alok-g »

p_l wrote: post #386
alok-g wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product. I think I may have misunderstood your original comment above. It seems intending to say: No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not necessarily on the work product. The human may partially have copyright over the work product as well, "how much" being dependent on how much new creative expression from the human was involved vs that…

That is in fact correct. Both the compiler (in absence of inclusion of copyrighted libraries) and the LLM are considered to not add creative work and thus do not change copyright status of the works they transform. You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries and the level of copyright from them applying to final output to be how much can be directly considered derivative,…

>> You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries ...

I like this comparison -- training set as '3rd party libraries'. Except, of course, that the authors behind the training set may not have actually granted permission to use, whereas the 3rd party libraries usually have some permission by way of license.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#389

Post by jeppester »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #300
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

Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.

A more logical explanation would be that there are different opinions and those who complain are usually louder.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#390

Post by comonoid »

Culonavirus wrote: post #341
fsckboy wrote: post #336

it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe. Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands. Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human cr…

> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion…

I wonder when my manager "prompts" me "I want the feature X and I want it fast", is his prompt a human creativity?
Post reply on HN