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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#401

Post by gspr »

RealityVoid wrote: post #263
gspr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Ok, so I use the LLM. I use the tool. Can I now apply the exemption to me? Are you telling me that I can use the thing, but I can't use it if I process it through an LLM? It get slippery, fast.

What's special about LLMs in your argument? When I was an edgy teenager in the 90s, I'd argue that it's not piracy because the DivX representation of the movie isn't bit-for-bit identical to the Hollywood master or whatever. If your reasoning works for LLMs as the tools, surely it also works for video compression.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#402

Post by gspr »

RealityVoid wrote: post #265
gspr wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

… so a bunch of people just decided that rights we granted to humans also apply to their tools? Without any discussion? This isn't how anything is supposed to work when it comes to common rules!

The common rules are so because we agree on them. On principle, in this case, we do not agree what the rule should be here and it's in a way unprecedented. We'll soon converge to a societal agreement. I hope society abstaining itself from tools will not be the answer.

And the process by which we agree is lawmaking.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#403

Post by gspr »

p_l wrote: post #385
gspr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

... and from that temporary monopoly humans have exemptions (critique, inspiration, etc.)

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#404

Post by tngranados »

amelius wrote: post #394
gorgoiler wrote: post #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 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.

That's a matter of changing a law, it's all up to the people and their representatives. We talk as if everything is set on stone but if there really is a will, there is a way.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#405

Post by wartywhoa23 »

simonebrunozzi wrote: post #398
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

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

A case when security through obscurity is perfectly justified.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#406

Post by ap99 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #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 ex…

What's an example of data that might have been stolen?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#407

Post by gspr »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #272
gspr wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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

If we take the point of view that LLMs are tools (I agree), then people need to be absolutely certain that these tools don't contain (compressed) representations of copyrighted works.

People seem not to want to do that. And they argue that the LLMs have "learned" or "been inspired" by the copyrighted works, which is OK for humans.

This is the problem. People can't even agree on which of two mutually exclusive defenses to appeal to! Are LLMs tools which we have to ensure aren't used to reproduce copyrighted work without permission, or are they entities that can be granted exemptions like humans can? It can't be both!

> 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.

True. While IP-owning companies like Microsoft now say "it's online, so we can use it".

It's bizarre.

I'll tell you what: I'll drop my conservative stance in defense if FOSS when Windows and the latest Hollywood movie are "fair use" for consumption by whatever LLM I cook up.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#408

Post by wartywhoa23 »

amelius wrote: post #394
gorgoiler wrote: post #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 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.

The proof is the $stupid-billion infrastructure built and kept up to host mousetraps armed with free cheese made of virtue signalling about doing the right thing and sharing the code with the world for free.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#409

Post by dash2 »

I wrote an R library doing some simple regressions using the GPU, with Claude. I asked it to provide the same API as lm, glm and some other base R functions. It copied their code wholesale without mentioning it to me. So, now my library is GPL… which is not a big deal in this context, but it was quite a shock.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#410

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

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…

Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it. What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.
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