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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?

#291

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

adrian_b wrote: post #111
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sounds like a problem that's pretty easy to get around. CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around. And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training. It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce. It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you t…

Unlike GPL, BSD and Apache licenses do not claim to also cover your non-AI-generated code that only invokes the AI-generated code. However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it. Therefore, unless the AI model has been trained only on non-copyrighted publ…

> However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.

I can't speak for all licenses, but I'm familiar with at least one BSD license. That's almost the entire point of it...

You cannot take their literal code and call it your own. You can derive code from it and call it your own. That's what LLMs primarily do.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#293

Post by semiquaver »

DrewADesign wrote: post #277
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…

But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?

The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.

So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.”

Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#294

Post by rnxrx »

The idea that the provenance of a given tool's code inherently pollutes the material it's used with seems kind of illogical. Wouldn't it follow from this premise that any code written using open source IDEs and debugged with open source debuggers and other tooling would itself then be considered copyleft? Are works written with LibreOffice not copyrightable?

There's obviously a huge issue with the legitimacy and ownership of training data being fed to LLMs. That seems like an issue between the owners of that IP and the people training the models and selling them as services more than the people using the tool. Isn't this just another flavor of SCO trying to extort money out of companies using Linux?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#295

Post by jacquesm »

alchemism wrote: post #286
jacquesm wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. =}

That's not how that works.

You warrant you wrote the code yourself, then it is found your code infringes on code owned by other entities. Now you have a tough choice: admit you lied about writing your code yourself tainting all of the code you claim you wrote since these tools became available or stand and take the infringement penalty which could be very substantial.

Judges and courts don't like playing silly games like this.

I've sued two parties for copyright infringement and won and a third settled out of court for a substantial sum. You don't tell a judge you don't need to prove you wrote the code, that's an automatic loss. Then there are such things as expert witnesses who will interview you and check how much you know about the code you claim you wrote.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#296

Post by cogman10 »

red75prime wrote: post #264
cogman10 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Bittorent is not a relevant example, because the system is designed to restore the work in its fullness. You can restore shredded documents with enough time and effort. And if you did that and started making photo copies, even if they are incomplete, you will run afoul of copyright law. Bittorrent is a relevant example because it shows that shredding doesn't destroy copyright. Remember, copyright is about the right…

I've meant idealized shredding: a destructive transformation, which is still a machine transformation (think blender instead of shredder). When you need the exact knowledge of a thing to make its (imperfect) copy using some mechanism, it doesn't mean that the mechanism violates copyright. EDIT: I don't say that neural networks can't rote learn extensive passages (it's an effect of data duplication). I'm saying that t…

I'd assume it's still a copyright violation if you copied and distributed the shredded copy.

The way I arrive at that is imagine you add just 1 pixel of static to a video, that'd still be a copyright violation. Now imagine you slowly keep adding those random pixels. Eventually you get to the point where the whole video is just static, but at some point it wasn't.

Now, would any media company or court sue over that? Probably not. But I believe that still falls under copy right (but maybe fair use?).

The issue with neural networks is they aren't people. Even when you point your LLM at a website and say "summarize this" the output of that summation would be owned by the website itself by nature of it being a machine transformed work.

Remembered, it's not just mere rote recitation which violates the law, any transformation counts as well. The fact that AI companies are preventing it doesn't really solve the problem that they are in fact transforming multiple copyrighted works into their responses.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#297

Post by cooper_ganglia »

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" ?

From the article:

> Specifying an objective to the model is not enough. Directing how the work is constructed is what counts.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#298

Post by KallDrexx »

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…

Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason?

The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work.

The author can grant authorship and copyright to the commissioner with a contract, but the monkey picture (and others) have solidified that only humans can be granted copyright. Since LLMs aren't human they can't hold copyright, and if the LLM doesn't have legal copyright then they don't have legal rights to assign copyright to you.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#299

Post by KallDrexx »

greensoap wrote: post #178
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…

Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires…

It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship.

While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#300

Post by NewsaHackO »

nadermx wrote: post #124
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…

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

Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
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