Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

281–290 of 570 posts

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#281

Post by reliablereason »

freejazz wrote: post #266
reliablereason wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Claude is not a legal entity, it is a software tool that outputs text based on statistics. There is a user that used a tool to create text and that user is the legal entity responsible for the text in any legal way that matters. Anything else would be completely ridiculous given current laws in most countries. It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.

> Claude is not a legal entity And? >It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone. No more ridiculous than you posting something you know nothing about. Just because you don't get the copyright doesn't mean claude does. The fact that claude is not a legal entity has no bearing on whether or not you are entitled to a copyright for a work you did not create.

If neither the user or the tool created and is responsible for the text, who is in your mind?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#282

Post by thyrsus »

embedding-shape wrote: post #31
e12e wrote: post #28

Seems to gloss over other kinds of contamination, beyond GPL code. Code from pirated text books, the problem with the entire language model being trained on copyright data, and on the possibility of the training data containing various copyrighted code.

> Code from pirated text books Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.

I've seen copyright notices that explicitly forbid use for AI training. Would this "transformation" argument still hold in such cases?

For example:

No Generative AI Training Use

For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and grants no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless individual or entity obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does any individual or entity have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio without Author’s specific and express permission.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#284

Post by CamperBob2 »

array_key_first wrote: post #278
CamperBob2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable. The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coi…

Of course it's relevant. How copyright infringement happens doesn't actually matter, all that matters is that the infringement happened. If I painstakingly recreate A New Hope frame by frame, pixel by pixel, that's infringement. Even if I technically used 0 content from the original.

Nobody is doing that, though. You might get a watermarked screenshot or stock photo now and then, or a couple of mostly-verbatim paragraphs from Harry Potter.

In any case, if the copyright mafia insists on butting heads with AI, they'll find that the fight doesn't quite play out the way it has in the past.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#286

Post by alchemism »

jacquesm wrote: post #221
keithba wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code). Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always)…

If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off. The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you ma…

Prove I did not write my code if I do not tell you which tools I used. =}

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#287

Post by matheusmoreira »

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…

> meaningful human authorship

How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#288

Post by wayeq »

matheusmoreira wrote: post #287
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…

> meaningful human authorship How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?

read the article?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#289

Post by conartist6 »

d1sxeyes wrote: post #129
conartist6 wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing. Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?

Anna Karenina is public domain, assuming you’re talking about the original? If you translate it then maybe you could release it under GPL, but bit odd?

I think you missed the "what if". It was just a point about how the constructed scenario might be different to the real scenario. Most AIs are not trained only on public-domain work.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#290

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

nine_k wrote: post #104
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably, every company that has non-LGPL CC code in production wants to own it...

"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.

> "Own" as in "be responsible for". Nobody is too keen to own a pile of semi-working trash

And yet that was the state of software at every company I worked at before FAANG, and even a good amount there...

Post reply on HN