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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume it's still a copyright violation if you copied and distributed the shredded copy. The way I arrive at that is imagine you add just 1 pixel of static to a video, that'd still be a copyright violation. Now imagine you slowly keep adding those random pixels. Eventually you get to the point where the whole video is just static, but at some point it wasn't. Now, would any media company or court sue over that? P…

When you point your browser at a website the browser creates a (transformed) local copy of the information that is owned by the website itself. The browser needs to do that to render the website on your screen. Is it a violation of copyright (that the website is willing to tolerate because it profits from advertisements)?

No, because your browser is dealing with the distribution of data in a way intended by the copyright holder. You also aren't redistributing the webpage after rendering. Client side modifications fall under fair use which is what keeps the likes of ad blockers and other page modifiers legal.

What would violate copyright is if you took that rendered page, turned it into a jpeg, and then hosted that jpeg from your own servers. That's the copying that would run afowl of copyright law.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#392
Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich:

1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards?

2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food?

3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law?

By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been exploited in pursuit of my answer.

That’s being charitable, really. In practice the open secret of the AI industry is that the vast majority of training data, for want of a better word even if it is likely to be the most precise description, is stolen data.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#393

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.

Its not about "billion-dollar companies' copyrights", but also about voluntary copyleft free software. If I license my code under GPL I don't want other persons/companies just whitewash that code through LLMs and use it in their proprietary code.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#394

Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich: 1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards? 2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food? 3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law? By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been ex…

Probably, yes, but the burden of proof is with us not them.

I'm already glad some companies have the guts to open their models because proving it for open models is probably a lot easier than for a model behind a service.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#395
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…

I wonder what OSS licenses would have looked like if we saw all of this coming.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Those "statistics" that the output is based on are often under licenses that forbid making proprietary software with them for example. It is not the same as using Word.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#397

Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich: 1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards? 2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food? 3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law? By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been ex…

The media industry loves to quote ridiculous numbers on lost revenue due to piracy etc. May be a rough ballpark numbers will get them to do something about this theft.

Can someone put a rough estimate on potential revenue loss (direct and incidental) from training AI with industry wise breakup.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#398
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

Curious: how do you exactly detect an AI-generated comment?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#399
post #397

Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich: 1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards? 2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food? 3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law? By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been ex…

The media industry loves to quote ridiculous numbers on lost revenue due to piracy etc. May be a rough ballpark numbers will get them to do something about this theft . Can someone put a rough estimate on potential revenue loss (direct and incidental) from training AI with industry wise breakup.

It’s wrong to stop progress. I just want to know what data went into my model and have access to the same data. The same way we have national libraries of books but with the caveat that I don’t really know how one is supposed to browse petabytes of OpenAI .zips like I browse old books.

If the data is proprietary (eg Meta’s stash of FB comments) then I am satisfied to be told it’s private and I can’t see it. If, however, the works were public then give me a URL if it’s live or a cached copy if it isn’t.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#400
post #269

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.

Appreciated!

@dang, just wanted to say that it seems that the response to your statement does also seem to be AI generated. Dead-internet theory is turning real day by the day, oof.
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