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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#231

Post by idle_zealot »

demorro wrote: post #165
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…

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 a…

I get the individual/corporation distinction, but how is a machine another tier here? It's a tool, it can't have any rights at all. The wielder has rights, and curtailing their rights depending on what tool they're using to exercise them seems strange. Potentially justifiable, but it's a different axis from the nature of the actor.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#232

Post by [deleted] »

hackingonempty wrote: post #196
senaevren wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire…

> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effe…

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#233

Post by senaevren »

mbesto wrote: post #212
senaevren wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is exactly the gap the piece is aimed at. The M&A conversation is where this becomes concrete very fast, and most founders shipping AI-assisted code have not had it yet.

Eh, it does and it doesn't. PE investors actively are asking why more of the portfolio companies aren't generating codebases using Claude Code. You are right that lawyers are asking about code generated by LLMs but this is more of a CYA out of ignorance more than anything else (btw - many purchase agreements have funny representations like "your code is free of bugs" which is downright hilarious). So these two things…

The tension you are describing is real and the piece does not capture it well enough. PE acquirers pushing portfolio companies toward Claude Code while their lawyers are adding AI code reps to purchase agreements is exactly the gap that will produce the first painful deal. The rep usually survives unsigned because neither side has done the analysis. When the first deal falls apart or a rep is breached post-close because of GPL contamination in an AI-assisted codebase, that will set the market standard faster than any court ruling.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#234

Post by sarchertech »

adrian_b wrote: post #116
sarchertech wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.

No. It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid. So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid. If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid. The open source licenses are intended as de…

Yes.

“ Copyright

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

The copyright assertion is the very first line of the MIT license, and the right to copy the code is granted. Clearly a reasonable person would affirm that that license (and all similar licenses) are based on a premise that code can be copyrighted.

> It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.

>If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.

That’s not true. Imagine a world where proprietary licenses are made invalid.

In such a world a company could take open source code compile it and distribute it (or build a SaaS) without the source code.

Even if you only focus on licenses that don’t prohibit this, most of those licenses require attribution.

So even in a world where propriety licenses were invalid the majority of open source licenses would still have a purpose.

You’re attempting to split hairs to argue on a very subtle technicality, but you’re not even technically right.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#235

Post by sarchertech »

user34283 wrote: post #119
sarchertech wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s so much FOMO right now around AI that no one is thinking clearly. I wouldn’t be so confident in your company.

To evaluate the legal risks of using AI generated code, let’s consider how many lawsuits there have been over these concerns. Inadvertent copyleft license violations: probably 0 lawsuits Competitor copied your software, you could not defend your rights in court because it was made with AI: probably also 0 Users of agentic AI for software development: >10 million The thinking here seems pretty clear to me.

This is a terrible take. Complex litigation takes longer to play out than the time span that agents have existed.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#236

Post by mbesto »

senaevren wrote: post #233
mbesto wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eh, it does and it doesn't. PE investors actively are asking why more of the portfolio companies aren't generating codebases using Claude Code. You are right that lawyers are asking about code generated by LLMs but this is more of a CYA out of ignorance more than anything else (btw - many purchase agreements have funny representations like "your code is free of bugs" which is downright hilarious). So these two things…

The tension you are describing is real and the piece does not capture it well enough. PE acquirers pushing portfolio companies toward Claude Code while their lawyers are adding AI code reps to purchase agreements is exactly the gap that will produce the first painful deal. The rep usually survives unsigned because neither side has done the analysis. When the first deal falls apart or a rep is breached post-close beca…

> When the first deal falls apart or a rep is breached post-close because of GPL contamination in an AI-assisted codebase, that will set the market standard faster than any court ruling.

Assuming it ever does...first, GPL is hardly enforced and second, I feel like there is going to be enough money (e.g. Anthropic's own code it uses for the harness) that pushes back against it being problematic. We'll see.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#237

Post by sowbug »

senaevren wrote: post #169
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.

Since this is a tech audience... the Supreme Court uses a bounded priority queue. An unbounded queue would risk growing impractically large.

There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#238

Post by anikom15 »

yodon wrote: post #37
_flux wrote: post #21

I think it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input. After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.

>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…

LLMs aren’t human.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#240

Post by freejazz »

reliablereason wrote: post #239

This is like asking: "Who owns the text microsoft word helped you write?" Claude code is a software tool not a legal entity.

Not if claude does the writing. MS doesn't write things for you, and if it did, you would not be entitled to a copyright in whatever it wrote for you.
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