Your employer can claim your code if you use their tools to produce it. Nothing new here. This has nothing to do with AI tooling.
Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
151–160 of 570 posts
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Own" as in "be responsible for". Nobody is too keen to own a pile of semi-working trash, and extensive vide-coding can produce such piles easily.
Anyone can produce low-quality code, with or without AI. Agents have gotten exceptionally good however, and everyone should be including them in their workflow if they're able to.
Agents are more prolific. As with any power tool, they increase both your ability to build and to wreak havoc, depending on how you handle them.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#153Personally, 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…
The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise.
I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> books they bought and destroyed (legal) They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents? AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?
> They're only legal if training is fair use The judge seems to have said it's because they "transformed" the books (destroying them after digitalizing) in the process, that made it legal. > Ultimately, Judge William Alsup ruled that this destructive scanning operation qualified as fair use—but only because Anthropic had legally purchased the books first, destroyed each print copy after scanning, and kept the digital…
Interesting - so local models, like Google Gemini is then likely pirated by this interpretation - because the model is distributed? Ditto open weight models?
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#155Personally, 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.
So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill.
The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.
So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill. The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#157Copyright has a lot to do with what we as a society want to protect and encourage. We want to protect an author that put the hours into creating a book, as opposed to the person creating a copy of that work. The person copying can claim they put in work too but the claim is not strong enough to override our preference to protect original authors.
Part of the problem with generated works is that it is lower effort like the person copying something. It’s not an activity that demands special protection like original authorship. I believe this is a large part of the reasoning.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#158LLMs are just tools we use. If I program an app in C++, do I not own the rights to the executable because my compiler wrote machine code for me?
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#159Personally, 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…
Copyright isn't some natural state of being though, it's something that's granted to people by the government to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". If copyright hinders things then I think it's reasonable that exceptions would be made.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#160"if Claude was trained on the LGPL-licensed codebase and its output reflects patterns learned from that code, can the output be treated as license-free? The emerging legal consensus is probably not, and assuming it can creates significant liability for anyone shipping that code commercially." Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of ye…
thanks for this; it's definitely a fair point. I updated the piece to reflect this