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

341–350 of 570 posts

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#341

Post by Culonavirus »

fsckboy wrote: post #336

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 cr…

> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity

I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion of bugs and "basic bitch" solutions, asking for more robust this and edge case that. It felt like I wrote a novel. How is that not creativity (Crayon-eater or Picasso, creativity is creativity)?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#342

Post by jibal »

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.

Because the author acted on that comment.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#343

Post by green_wheel »

senaevren wrote: post #258
dang wrote: post #246

Could you please stop posting generated comments to HN? It's not allowed here, and it looks like you've done it over 30 times already. (Of course, there's no way to be certain of this, but it's what our software thinks, and the overall pattern is pretty convincing.) See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079

You are definitely right to flag it, apologize for that. I used an AI assistant for the replies, and I will make sure not to use one going forward.

Why do you use an AI assistant for the replies?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#344

Post by Aerroon »

jacquesm wrote: post #254
Aerroon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ > The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts…

> If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it? If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief. Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the c…

Oh, I do understand it - laws are contradictory and can do whatever people shout out the most that they should do (but they don't always work that way). I just think that it is extremely bad when laws work this way.

Technically when you select "copy image" instead of "copy image url" and paste that to a friend you're often committing copyright infringement. Do I think this is reasonable? Absolutely not. The same goes for this - the author should hold liability, so make the person who ends up causing the work to exist the damn author.

But nooo, we can't have that. Instead we need to have these convoluted exceptions that don't at all work how the real world works, so that lawyers can have even more work.

Besides, if we go by "the law" then we already have a court case where training an AI model is protected by fair use. But obviously that isn't satisfying enough for people, so they keep talking about how it's stealing (refer to my first sentence).

Also, this situation is going to get funny when some country decides that AI generated content does get copyright protection.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#345

Post by Aerroon »

teddyh wrote: post #243
Aerroon wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ > The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts…

If you hold an illegal party on public land, you would still be liable, even though you did not own the land.

But that's not at all a comparable situation though, because it is your party. It doesn't matter where it is, we assign "ownership" of the party to you. Even the language we use explicitly states that. In the case of copyright, we explicitly states (by the copyright office), that you are not the author of an AI generated work.

Same point goes to if an animal takes a picture.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#346

Post by veber-alex »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #173
mattmanser wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of how AI works is that it's just really complicated compression, you can get AI to write out Harry Potter novels word for word with the right prompting. When it picks out a rare bit of code, it will be simply copying that code, illegally, and presenting it without attribution or any licenses which is in fact breaking the law but AI companies are too important for the law to apply to them. There's been instances…

Anthropic was sued successfully for training on books, the law still applies to them https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-... When I write fizzbuzz do I owe royalties to the inventor of fizzbuzz? Is my brain copyright thieving because I can write out the song lyrics from memory?

They got sued for downloading pirated books and not for using them for training. Huge difference.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#347

Post by aakresearch »

It seems that author unironically advises to write your commit messages like this: "Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch", to have a chance at defense in potential court hearing. I find it funny, if vindicating for my personal approach. If the expectation is to "restructure, reject, rewrite" what "AI" spits out, why use "AI" at all at this point???

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#348

Post by jongjong »

greensoap wrote: post #194
jmyeet wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position. Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court. Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other…

the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.

Logically, I think there's a big difference between code which was produced from a simple generic prompt without other input vs code which was produced from a multiple complex prompts with large existing code as input.

When I'm feeding AI my code as input and it ends up producing new code which adheres to my architecture, my coding style and my detailed technical requirements, the copyright over the output should be mine since the code looks exactly like what I would have produced by hand, there is no creative input from the AI. It's just a code completion tool to save time.

I understand if someone leaves an LLM running as an agent for multiple days and it produces a whole bunch of code, then it's a very different process.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#349

Post by marcus_holmes »

KallDrexx wrote: post #298
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 auth…

Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#350

Post by archargelod »

TurdF3rguson wrote: post #340
cooper_ganglia wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Leaks, whistleblowers. Some circumstantial evidence will also do if there's enough of it. Like having hallucinated parts of code that do absolutely nothing, and can't be explained as e.g. leftovers from a refactor.
Post reply on HN