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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

421–430 of 570 posts

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#421

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.

> They would have to get their hands on your prompts

Unless you are running a local model, your prompts are almost certainly logged by your inference provider, and would only be a subpoena away?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it. What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.

Free water but not electricity? I'll just hook up a generator to the shower... These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.

I wonder how much of linux and *BSD is in the windows kernel.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#423

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.…

AFIK: Even the slightest modification of the work is transformative and will produce copyrighted material.

It does not have to be substantial transformation.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#424
post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's legal and perfectly reasonable for a human being to combine organic fuels with oxygen from the air to create energy and CO2. Any law restricting that would be the worst form of tyranny. It would not be reasonable to allow machines to do that at unlimited scale without restrictions. (Hopefully the fossil fuels industry won't draw inspiration from the legal arguments made by AI companies...)

> It's legal and perfectly reasonable for a human being to combine organic fuels with oxygen from the air to create energy and CO2.

Is there any line past which it becomes unreasonable?

> It would not be reasonable to allow machines to do that at unlimited scale without restrictions.

If the machines were a replacement for a damaged respiratory system in a human would it reasonable?

What about if the machine were being used by a human to do something else that was important?

Where is the line where it becomes reasonable?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

Although this decision is not binding in other circuit courts, this decision still is something that you can bring to a judge in other courts. They are not required to follow this ruling because they are not in that circuit. However, they still will consider what other courts have said and that will be incentive to think hard before they do something different. A judge who does something different is generally expected to write up a reason why they did something different, and that's something that would be given to an appeals court if they do do something different for consideration of why the other court was wrong.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#426

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 still sounds incredibly vague and open for interpretation. For example, is setting up md files defining how you want things to be written enough?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#427
> Here is the legal baseline, in plain terms:

This particular AI-ism really encapsulates what annoys me about some AI-isms. I don't mind the delves and the em-dashes that just give away the AI source of what otherwise might be good text. But these structural pieces just feel fundamentally not for the reader. Part of it is blatant pick-me language for the human feedback ("hey look you wanted plain language I did that") and part of it feels like it's just helping the future token stream (thinking-like tokens polluting the actual text).

The not-this-but-that, the sycophancy, the symbolizing-vague-significance, they all have this flavor of serving a process that's no longer there as I now need to read it. It gives a similar sickening feeling to the one I get seeing something designed by committee.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#428
post #216
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.

This is a perfect example of 'begging the question'. Arriving at a conclusion from a fact assumed as true without evidence. Your reductio does not actually demonstrate that copyright applies to LLMs, because you did not demonstrate how transcoding is comparable to inference, just that LLMs can reproduce some passages from copyrighted works. You could also produce passages from copyrighted works by generating enough random sequences of words, but no one is arguing that is comparable to transcoding. That the people who do not share this conclusion are engaging in motivated reasoning is based only on your assumption and has no logical backing, and is therefore begging the question.
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