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

301–310 of 570 posts

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#301

Post by kouru225 »

senaevren wrote: post #128
kouru225 wrote: post #112

IMO this is the greatest argument against AI as technofascism. The general public seems to believe that AI will usher in technofascism by claiming corporate ownership of AI output: the independent entrepreneur will be unable to compete against the corporations compute, every piece of data about you will be stolen and monetized by AI, and you will own nothing. But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the…

The original bargain you describe, limited term in exchange for public disclosure, is exactly what makes the current situation strange. If AI-generated output falls into the public domain immediately, that is actually closer to the original intent of copyright than 95-year terms. The legal question is whether that outcome happens by design or by accident, and what it means for the people building products on top of A…

By design or by accident

It’ll happen by evolution. Just complex systems trending the way they trend.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#303

Post by aeon_ai »

array_key_first wrote: post #273
tensor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

The "learning" isn't learning really. I mean it might be, but if you define learning to be a human endeavor than AI can't learn. It's perfectly reasonable to say it's okay for humans to do something but not okay for a computer program to do the same thing. We don't have to equate AI to humans, that's a choice and usually a bad one.

If one defines 'flying' to be a bird's endeavor, then humans can't fly.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to catch a metal shuttle that chucks itself through the air on wings.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#304

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

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…

From TFA:

> When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way.

Your quoted text is no longer in TFA.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#305

Post by eddyfromtheblok »

p0w3n3d wrote: post #40

That's quite impressive approach from the companies' perspective. Let's first use claude code and then we'll think who the code belongs to. I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people. First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code. Second…

people quickly have forgotten: when copilot was announced, there were warnings not to use it for company code because of the license attribution problem. so what's changed? that anthropic is willing to defend and indemnify?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#306

Post by kazinator »

> Code that Claude Code or Cursor generated and you accepted without meaningful modification may not be copyrightable by anyone.

Except if it happens to regurgitate a significant excerpt of some existing work, then the authors of that can assert their copyright; i.e. claim that it infringes.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#307

Post by sgc »

palata wrote: post #81
cillian64 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.

Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code. If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright an…

This is a very long-standing and AFAIK never explicitly decided copyright and human rights question: If something is Public Domain, are contracts restricting distribution valid? Is our right to information or knowledge a fundamental human right that is not permissible to take from others, such that restrictions greater than those imposed directly by the State are invalid? In a healthy society, "I have created an extraction machine and your actions are hindering my extraction" is not a valid argument. So at the very least contracts restricting rights to public dmoain works should be allowed only with heavy restrictions as to when, how, and for how long they are binding - much like the legality of non-competes have has steadily reduced in many places in recent years.

CC0 came about in part because of this ambiguity. To deal with it, part of CC0 basically says - even if there would still be restrictions to this if it were only in the public domain, I renounce those theoretical rights.

Outside the underdeveloped legal framework, I believe knowledge and truth is like life, and human society has some continued philosophical growth required here.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#308

Post by spankalee »

boh wrote: post #216
tensor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.

Yes I guess there's also no such thing as stealing in torrents since the computer "learns" the data and returns it in a transcoded fashion so it's technically not a reproduction. Yes LLMs can reproduce passages from copyrighted works verbatim but that's only because it "learned" it and it's just telling you what it "knows". The mental calisthenics required to justify this stuff must be exhausting.

Humans have been known to recite entire parts from plays from memory, live in front of audiences even.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#309

Post by daishi55 »

sarchertech wrote: post #80
daishi55 wrote: post #36

I’m no lawyer but I feel that meta, my employer, wouldn’t be letting us go hog-wild with Claude code if they weren’t completely confident that they fully owned the outputs, whether we change it or not.

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

I would bet you any amount of money that metas ownership over CC-generated code is never challenged or threatened

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#310

Post by sarchertech »

pocksuppet wrote: post #253
sarchertech wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

MIT just disclaims all the author's rights except attribution. If it turns out the code isn't copyrightable, nothing really changes. A better example would be GPL.

I mentioned that in my comment, but attribution is a big deal.
Post reply on HN