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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#471

Post by perlgeek »

reorder9695 wrote: post #455

The whole thing with GPL code seems like a mess and surely couldn't be set as actual precedent, right? It is totally infeasible for me to check every single GPL project on every code hosting platform to see if the code Claude etc produced is too similar. If a set of training data used for the model was released to check against that would be one thing, but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo availab…

> but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo available from all time to see if a model [...] might've reproduced code from it.

Well, if you care about not violating any licenses, you could buy services from an LLM provider that was only trained on code in the Public Domain (or code that the LLM provider licensed for that purpose), and/or buy some kind of legal guarantee from the LLM provider that the code produced is "clean".

Of course, that'd be much more expensive than current offerings, but it would reflect the real cost of software development, not just YOLOing it, from a legal perspective.

When I wrote a book, part of the contract with my publisher was that I had to attest that I actually wrote the book myself, that quotes were properly attributed etc. If you buy code-writing services, why shouldn't it contain similar clauses?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#472

Post by dehrmann »

cestith wrote: post #461

I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shou…

> training the LLM in violation of a license

Bartz v. Anthropic found that this is fair use, so the license doesn't play into it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#473

Post by tremon »

akersten wrote: post #462
reorder9695 wrote: post #455

The whole thing with GPL code seems like a mess and surely couldn't be set as actual precedent, right? It is totally infeasible for me to check every single GPL project on every code hosting platform to see if the code Claude etc produced is too similar. If a set of training data used for the model was released to check against that would be one thing, but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo availab…

> Surely the precedent would have to be that a model trained on GPL code has itself been infected by GPL, and therefore must have all source/weights released I don't see how this follows, unless we also agree that humans who have ever read any GPL code are themselves permanently tainted and therefore cannot produce anything that isn't influenced even slightly by said code. Is it just because we think the robot does a…

The robot does a better job at reproduction. I don't think there exists a definition of "learning" unambiguous enough to make the claim that it learns better than humans. Specifically, published models don't learn at all -- after the training phase, the model weights are fully static.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#474

Post by numbsafari »

vablings wrote: post #469
cestith wrote: post #461

I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shou…

It is probably fair that a huge share of code that is Foss is licensed under GPL, much larger than the share of source available proprietary licensed code

I would have assumed the opposite is true. Do you have any data to back that up?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#475

Post by CWuestefeld »

gspr wrote: post #407
CWuestefeld wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 copy…

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.

I've pointed out elsewhere in this thread that this is the opposite of how the real world works.

In actual fact, people who need software built hire a tool (e.g., a software developer like me) to build it for them. That tool - me or you - has inside it a tremendous library of copyrighted works represented. I've worked on enough different projects over the decades that the next CRUD function, or rule-driven data-entry tool, or whatever, that I build is going to draw very significantly from the last ones I built. And those last ones were copyrighted, with those rights held by my employer at the time, and maybe even protected by NDA or defense-style classifications.

Is your position that this is OK so long as it's stuff that I can keep in my squishy brain, but the moment that mechanism moves to silicon, it somehow becomes fundamentally different?

The other major argument I see in this thread is that for LLMs it's different because there's a third party who is aggregating the data, and selling me (or my employer) use of that tool. But this doesn't change the overall picture at all. It just adds one more layer of dereferencing into it. The addition of that middleman hasn't altered the moral landscape: how is hiring me, along with what's in my memory, different from hiring the combination of me plus a helper to supplement my memory? There's an aspect of scale, I suppose. With that helper I can achieve greater quantities, but it's not changing the story in a qualitative way.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#476

Post by projektfu »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #268
blks wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re confusing yourself with a commercial product. You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP.

You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP. It turns out that's false. We know that genes are patentable; remember back during the Human Genome Project, when there was such a rush to patent them? So genes are IP. (This seems bizarre to me, since they're patenting something that was found just sitting there, but this is what the system says right now.) Well, two other humans…

It's a little more complicated, and I would argue that the court got it wrong, but you cannot patent a gene as it exists and rests in nature. You can patent the cDNA (reverse-transcribed mRNA) genetic code after intron removal, which they argue is not a natural thing, but I think they misunderstood the science, really the triviality of the "invention".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_for_Molecular_Path....

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#477

Post by perlgeek »

_flux wrote: post #92
yodon wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input. If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copy…

Let's say we didn't have assemblers, but instead we would have three professions: - Specifiers, who make the specification for the system - Programmers, who write C code - Machine encoders, that take that C code and write machine code for a CPU Would it be that the copyright would then belong to programmers, if no other explicit assignments would be made? --- Thinking about it, probably yes: copyright of the spec bel…

In music, you can have copyright for a composition (like, lyrics and sheet music), and then for a master record. If you sell a copy of a song, you generally have pay royalties to both copyright holders.

So, in your example, the specifiers would own the specification, the programmers the C code, and machine encoders own the machine code.

But the ownership wouldn't be complete. If you sell the machine code, you'd have to pay royalties to all three. If you only sold the C code, only to the specifiers and the programmers.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#478

Post by graemep »

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…

It also contradicts everything else I have read about Thaler. AFAIK the ruling was that the AI could not hold copyright. Thaler waived any claim to the the copyright holder himself.

The last two bullet points on this page cover this:

https://www.authorsalliance.org/2025/03/19/thaler-v-perlmutt...

The site also explains the qualifications and experience in copyright law of the author of the above - unlike the article here.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#479

Post by WillPostForFood »

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…

Furthermore, we shouldn't even be looking to the Supreme Court at all for this. Congress needs to define the laws around AI and copyright. The Supreme Court is likely avoiding cases in the hope that the legislature gets its act together.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#480

Post by Eisenstein »

leereeves wrote: post #467
Eisenstein wrote: post #464

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you refusing to engage with your own metaphor?

You're taking the metaphor much too seriously. It was only an example to illustrate that human rights don't automatically apply to machines. Let's not read too much into it.

You made a claim and used a metaphor to demonstrate that claim. I asked a very simple question about the bounds of the metaphor and thus the claim. You are dodging answering the questions which mean that you cannot defend the logic of your claim. Thus you have forfeited that your claim is valid and 'human rights don't automatically apply to machines' has not been illustrated.
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