Who owns the code Claude Code wrote? • Hacker News Board

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#461

Post by cestith » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:04 PM UTC

I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shoulders of the contributors to the originally licensed code. It lies on the people inserting it into your codebase without following the terms of the license.

The article also singles out the GPL repeatedly as a source of contamination. It doesn’t mention source-available proprietary licenses. It doesn’t mention code put online with no clear license, which according to the Bern Convention and the laws in at least the United States is automatically copyright protected with no license for use by others at all. It doesn’t talk about attribution for BSD-style or CC-SA-Attribution licenses. There’s no mention of leaked proprietary code. It just singles out GPL as some sort of unique problem.

This seems quite shoddy and biased for an article by someone who’s writing about the law.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#462

Post by akersten » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

reorder9695 wrote: post #455

The whole thing with GPL code seems like a mess and surely couldn't be set as actual precedent, right? It is totally infeasible for me to check every single GPL project on every code hosting platform to see if the code Claude etc produced is too similar. If a set of training data used for the model was released to check against that would be one thing, but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo availab…

> Surely the precedent would have to be that a model trained on GPL code has itself been infected by GPL, and therefore must have all source/weights released

I don't see how this follows, unless we also agree that humans who have ever read any GPL code are themselves permanently tainted and therefore cannot produce anything that isn't influenced even slightly by said code.

Is it just because we think the robot does a better job at learning than we do? It's an impossible line to draw, I agree, but I don't agree that the answer is "well then everything must be considered tainted," I say the answer is "ignore a vestigial concern of a bygone era."

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#463

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:05 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #445

Eisenstein wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bein…

> Is there any line past which it becomes unreasonable? That's exactly the question we should be asking about AI and fair use.

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#464

Post by Eisenstein » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #445

Eisenstein wrote: post #424

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 bein…

> Is there any line past which it becomes unreasonable? That's exactly the question we should be asking about AI and fair use.

Are you refusing to engage with your own metaphor?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#465

Post by fooqux » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:07 PM UTC

sevenzero wrote: post #454

fooqux wrote: post #450

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read that paragraph multiple times (both in the original and in your post) and I don't see anything that says who owns the resulting text. Just where it comes from. Am I missing something obvious?

>will retrieve snippets from publicly available open source code Pretty sure it depends on the license the open source project uses. I dont think it's too troublesome if the autocomplete was truly only taken from open source projects, but it wouldn't surprise me if most closed source projects are also weighted into these models...

Ah, thank you. I read that but wasn't connecting the dots properly.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#466

Post by Leynos » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:11 PM UTC

pjmlp wrote: post #444

fooqux wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just did. Nothing in here says who owns the resulting text. Did I miss something?

> If you hover over a line of code in your application, coding assistance services will display code strings of supported function calls available through the coding assistance service that are also present in your current code file. Coding assistive services will retrieve snippets from publicly available open source code showing how others are using those same functions. 3. THIRD PARTY COMPONENTS. The software may i…

That is not auto-complete, that's API Usage Examples. See: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=VisualSt...

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#467

Post by leereeves » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:17 PM UTC

Eisenstein wrote: post #464

leereeves wrote: post #445

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there any line past which it becomes unreasonable? That's exactly the question we should be asking about AI and fair use.

Are you refusing to engage with your own metaphor?

You're taking the metaphor much too seriously. It was only an example to illustrate that human rights don't automatically apply to machines. Let's not read too much into it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#468

Post by cozzyd » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:18 PM UTC

reorder9695 wrote: post #455

The whole thing with GPL code seems like a mess and surely couldn't be set as actual precedent, right? It is totally infeasible for me to check every single GPL project on every code hosting platform to see if the code Claude etc produced is too similar. If a set of training data used for the model was released to check against that would be one thing, but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo availab…

There's an easy solution... release your code as GPL :)

(but that doesn't protect you against GPL-incompatible copyleft licenses, I guess)

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#469

Post by vablings » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:20 PM UTC

cestith wrote: post #461

I find it distasteful and disturbing that copyright infringement by the people training the LLM in violation of a license is considered contamination by the licensed code. It’s not contamination. The code didn’t seep into your codebase. If the LLM was trained in such a way that portions of code long enough to be protectable then the license was violated by humans. The liability for the problem doesn’t lie on the shou…

It is probably fair that a huge share of code that is Foss is licensed under GPL, much larger than the share of source available proprietary licensed code

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#470

Post by tremon » Wed, Apr 29, 2026, 2:23 PM UTC

reorder9695 wrote: post #455

The whole thing with GPL code seems like a mess and surely couldn't be set as actual precedent, right? It is totally infeasible for me to check every single GPL project on every code hosting platform to see if the code Claude etc produced is too similar. If a set of training data used for the model was released to check against that would be one thing, but you can't honestly expect someone to check every repo availab…

Duplicating BSD-licensed code without copyright attribution and mention of the original license is just as much a violation of the original copyright -- that applies regardless of additional copyleft requirements imposed by the GPL. A different but no less serious restriction applies to all the code examples on MSDN: the license disallows using the samples in production code.

LLMs are effectively copyright laundering machines, and barring any indemnification clauses in the ToS (of course there are none), full liability lies with the user.