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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#161

Post by Aerroon »

jacquesm wrote: post #156
kridsdale1 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

He's making a point about responsibility/liability.

If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output.

Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#162

Post by rspeele »

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…

For another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place.

Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.

Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.

I guess I'm just irrational that way.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#163

Post by nairboon »

skadge wrote: post #11

This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?

Copyright law kind of transcends national borders by certain international treaties like the Berne Convention. Which is why the US copyright holders could enforce their "woulnd't steal a car" threats in Europe.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#164

Post by torben-friis »

Isamu wrote: post #157

Copyright 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 lik…

AI is a monster to our current copyright system - monster in the philosophical sense, that is, an example that destroys the concept.

First, its creation is (claimed to be) extremely useful for society, but in order to be created it requires ignoring copyright for pretty much everything ever written. Something we kinda shrugged under the table.

Then, it introduces an extreme jump down in creation effort - so if the focus is protection of effortful creation, nothing with AI use qualifies. But of course, you'd want society to benefit from effortlessness in general, spending more effort than needed in a task is the opposite of efficiency.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#165

Post by demorro »

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…

Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled.

I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#166

Post by saadn92 »

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…

I agree with this sentiment, because the person directing the agent can still direct it in a way where it'll produce a better or worse output than another person directing it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#167

Post by semiquaver » 

  > 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 to the merits and does not settle the issue nationwide.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#168

Post by mattmanser »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #153
CWuestefeld wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Part of how AI works is that it's just really complicated compression, you can get AI to write out Harry Potter novels word for word with the right prompting.

When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them.

There's been instances where models have spat out comments in code that mention original authors, etc., effectively outing itself as a copyright thief.

There's nothing anyone can do about it, but the suspicion is that the big companies have taken everyone's code on GitHub, without consent, and trained on it.

And now are spitting out big chunks of copyrighted code and presented it as somehow transformed even though all they've actually done is change a few variable names.

It is copyright theft, but because programmers are little people, not Disney, we don't have any recourse.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#169

Post by senaevren »

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…

Fair and correct. Cert denial means the Court declined to hear the case, not that it endorsed the lower court's reasoning or settled the question nationally. The DC Circuit ruling stands and the Copyright Office's position is consistent, but that is stable doctrine rather than Supreme Court-settled law. Updated the piece to reflect this distinction accurately.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#170

Post by whattheheckheck »

Ask chatgpt deep research citing court cases and it shows dark factory swe code are not copyrightable under current precedents.

Even steering it with prompts isn't enough. The guy couldn't copyright the image he made with ai, code is no different.

Maybe prompts written by humans are copyrightable.

Can't wait for the Billionaires to entrench in court they can steal everything for these machines and claim it as their own and maybe even reach for anything that it helps produce. Fuck that

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