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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#141

Post by dfxm12 »

jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

They won't want to own code that is malicious\illegal\used in crime, although it's really weird to me that no one (in LEO) seems to care that, for example, grok generates CSAM, revenge porn, probably other illegal things, so they'll probably get to have their cake and eat it too.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#142

Post by jacquesm »

Arcuru wrote: 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…

No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#143

Post by jacquesm »

CWuestefeld wrote: post #134
Arcuru wrote: 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…

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…

Scale and the ability to generate a livelihood of your creations and/or the ability to control how what you have created is used, for instance, to demand attribution.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#144

Post by helterskelter »

helterskelter wrote: post #122
jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

I'm not sure Anthropic would appreciate the liability that ownership would imply.

Too late to edit, but OpenAI certainly doesn't want ownership or liability, for the CSAM they've produced. They certainly don't want ownership/liability of code which does $ONLYAWFULTHING.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#145

Post by CWuestefeld »

senaevren wrote: post #61
jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If…

I can't see how that can work.

As a developer, the fact that my source code passed through a compiler - an automated tool - doesn't give the author of the compiler any claim on my executable code.

As an artist, the fact that I used, e.g., Rebelle to paint a digital painting, or that I used Lightroom (including generative AI to fill, or other ML/AI tools to de-noise and sharpen my image) in editing a photograph, doesn't give EscapeMotion, Adobe, or Topaz, any claims to my product.

Why, then, would there be any chance that use of a tool like Claude - a tool that's super-advanced to be sure, but at the end of the day operates by way of a mathematical algorithms - would confer any claims to Anthropic?

If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable

Is figuring out the appropriate prompts to use in directing Clause qualitatively different than using a (much) higher-level abstraction in coding? That is, there was never any talk as we climbed the abstraction layer from machine code to assembly to Fortran or C to 4GLs to Rust etc., that the assembler/compiler/IDE builder would have any ownership claim on the produced executable. In what sense can Anthropic et al assert that their tool, which just transforms our directives to some lower-level representation, creates ownership of that lower-level representation?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#147

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

jumploops wrote: post #146
qsera wrote: post #99

More interesting question is "Who wants to own it"... The answer is probably "Nobody"!

At what point is liability the only "job" left for humans?

I think it was tor.com that last year had a story where the newbie hired for the corporate HR dept ended up being the last human left after all others were replaced.

Ah, here we go, courtesy of google-ml: '"Human Resources" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published on Reactor[...] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/ '

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#148

Post by estimator7292 »

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.

Learning, probably not.

Copy/pasting at scale, yes

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#150

Post by bombcar »

dfxm12 wrote: post #141
jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

They won't want to own code that is malicious\illegal\used in crime, although it's really weird to me that no one (in LEO) seems to care that, for example, grok generates CSAM, revenge porn, probably other illegal things, so they'll probably get to have their cake and eat it too.

Those things have precise legal definitions which it may not be entirely clear that an LLM can even generate them - especially in the USA where the 1st covers things that many would think illegal (and are illegal in other countries).
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