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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#331

Post by protocolture »

alienll wrote: post #313

This is the same shape as the image cases. Zarya of the Dawn already settled it for Midjourney output: human-written elements were protected, AI-generated images were not. The character design didn't get copyright even though the human picked, prompted, and curated. Code isn't different. Prompting Claude to produce a function is closer to prompting Midjourney to produce a frame than to writing the function yourself.…

Depends on the scale of LLM involvement, the copyright office left a pretty big carve out for things that are human sourced and then modified by LLM, or the reverse, LLM output thats modified by human intention. (They had to do this because there are already pseudo random elements to digital artwork, like say, render clouds and render noise, that might otherwise poison an artwork). In fact I dont think this has been tested with Highlight area > Prompt a change to this area of the image workflows.

They also mention in the same document that were LLMs to more closely approximate deterministic tools, they would be open to reevaluating. That is Requesting X gets X without substantial wiggle room.

I dont think that last part has been tested with an extremely large set of prompts and human generated input to create a more deterministic output. Even outside of code, where you see large prompts, creative writing LLM tools, NovelAI or Sudowrite for instance can have pages and pages of spec for the LLM, sometimes close to 50% of the size of the final output.

Then there's testing, review etc, human processes confirming that the output meets spec, updating it where needed intelligently.

There are also foreign courts, with similar rules about human intention, that have found in favor of prompts only, where it could be demonstrated that multiple rounds of prompts were used to refine the image.

I wouldnt call this settled at all tbh. And to be honest, a lot of this doesnt require exposure. you dont need to own up to LLM use in a lot of settings, proving LLM use is so difficult its easy to jump up the ladder from LLM (100%) to LLM (50%) and ultimately claim ownership.

The people who will get busted for this are basically just super lazy leaving ChatGPT responses in, failing to pay an editor, failing to modify images for anything more than layouts.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#332

Post by red75prime »

cogman10 wrote: post #296
red75prime wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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? P…

When you point your browser at a website the browser creates a (transformed) local copy of the information that is owned by the website itself. The browser needs to do that to render the website on your screen. Is it a violation of copyright (that the website is willing to tolerate because it profits from advertisements)?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#333

Post by semiquaver »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #304
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.

c.f. OP’s comments in this thread.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#334

Post by tensor »

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.

It's also perfectly reasonable to say it's ok for a program or machine to do the same thing as a human. This has been the basis for the technological revolution since the dawn of technology.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#335

Post by rspeele »

all2 wrote: post #215
rspeele wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 un…

We're moving into the 'industrial age of software'. You exact issue, of bespoke, well thought out and well-crafted code is one that craftsmen felt at the beginning of the industrial age. Now, parts are designed and churned out by machines that no one sees or cares about (generally speaking). This is where we are going with software, and production at a truly industrial scale has its place. And so does well-crafted be…

It is not even about quality. In fact with an LLM following my orders I can create higher quality code than I ever did before. I always was operating within a budget whether it was defined by the # of hours my customers were willing to pay for, or the # of hours I was personally willing to invest in a side project. This budget manifested in the form of cut features, limited test coverage, limited documentation, and so on. So given the same budget or even a slightly reduced budget I can actually make higher quality software with slop superpowers.

If I spend 2 hours designing the domain model, 1 hour slopping out a rough implementation, and 5 hours polishing it with a combo of handwritten and vibed refactorings, I will get a better result than if I spent 8 hours writing everything by hand.

So my point is not that vibe software is lower quality, as my experience has shown the opposite. It is simply that the spirit of sharing my work was done with the idea that I was sharing it with others who toiled in the same craft, not sharing for consumption by machine. Not that I ever contributed anything very important to the open source world, that anybody depended on. Just personal projects I thought were neat or educational.

In hindsight I would probably still have open sourced what I did, because I think it's valuable to have on record that I competently programmed stuff before AI even existed, like pre-atomic steel. But I don't know if I will open source any personal code going forward.

====

To put it more succinctly: if somebody "ripped off" my open source code in 2018, I wasn't mad about that. Even if they didn't bother to attribute me, well, at least they saw my stuff, had a human brain cell light up appreciating it, and thought it was worth stealing. I'm flattered. But with LLMs my work can be reappropriated without a single human ever directly knowing or caring about it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#336

Post by fsckboy »

it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.

Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.

Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human creativity. Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity, so the balance is tilted in favor of AI generated copy not being copyrightable.

The Supreme Court or legislation could change this, and I'd guess there will be a movement to go in that direction, but till something like that succeeded it's not so.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#337

Post by d1sxeyes »

conartist6 wrote: post #289
d1sxeyes wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I didn't, but not sure what the point is. Maybe I missed something else?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#339

Post by d0100 »

everforward wrote: post #184
_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.

Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative. Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They…

The trick is to constrain the LLM to program in a very defined coding style

If I make the LLM generate code that follows my own code architecture and style, that should be enough creative input

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#340

Post by TurdF3rguson »

cooper_ganglia wrote: post #297
matheusmoreira wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's interesting but how is anyone supposed to prove it? They would have to get their hands on your prompts.
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