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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#491

Post by bluGill »

DrewADesign wrote: post #459
bluGill wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 expect…

Yeah, I’ve heard lawyers use decisions in other jurisdictions to give weight to their line of reasoning. The SC saying they aren’t reviewing an appeal might not make that universally binding, but it signals that they don’t categorically reject the lower court’s decision.

I doubt any lawyer would mention the SC didn't review this - that is meaningless and judges know it. They will however mention this case. Even if they case goes against them they will mention it so they can say why it is wrong (the opposition will be sure to mention it so they have to be prepared to take it down)

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#492

Post by KallDrexx »

marcus_holmes wrote: post #349
KallDrexx wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When you write code by hand, you are the author. As part of your contract with your employer you grant copyright and authorship to your employer by default (as stated in the contract).

The LLM is not employed by you or your employer, because you can't enter contracts with non human or non human organizations.

When you license a non-LLM code generation service (like a page that creates a website for you), that company owns the copyright of the generated website because their deterministic system generated code by defined rules and mechanisms that were defined by the code generation system. Assuming no LLM as part of that, there is no code that is generated by the system outside of the rules that they defined (it's not filling in the blanks that you or the code generation system didn't explicitly define).

Since they own the copyright of the website, they can then assign the copyright and authorship to you because of your license agreement to them.

Since the LLM is filling in the blanks on its own in undefined ways, it is the author and not Anthropic/OpenAI/ETC. That means that even though you have a license agreement with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.. to transfer copyright, they didn't have copyright/authorship, the LLM did. And since the LLM can't legally own copyright/authorship (since it isn't a human) then it can't grant it to you and you can't then grant it to your employer.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#494

Post by NewsaHackO »

inexcf wrote: post #446
NewsaHackO wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that's my point. They are different and contradictory opinions, which show hypocrisy.

No it is not your point. You're just arguing about a strawman that holds both of those contradictory positions.

You are attempting to invoke strawman. So is your point that there is not a significant overlap between posters who think that AI companies should not be allowed to pirated use copyrighted material in their training corpus and posters who themselves pirated copyrighted material such as movies, music, games, etc.?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#495

Post by dredmorbius »

Animats wrote: post #379
KallDrexx wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> only humans can be granted copyright. No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.

Under US copyright law, copyright protection subsists "in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression":

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102>.

It's not that corporations can't hold copyright. But a corporation cannot mechanically create "original works of authorship" by a purely mechanical process. That process is limited to human authors. "Works for hire" would be a common case of a human creator (author) resulting in a corporate assignment (ownership), see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire>.

Notably cases:

- The "monkey selfie" copyright case, in which photographer David Slater arranged for monkeys to take selfies. Copyright ownership denied by both the US Copyright Office (against Slater's claim) and (in a separate case arguing the monkey should hold copyright) by an appellate court: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>, Naruto v. Slater, No. 16‑CV‑00063 (N.D. Cal. 2016).

- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Simple compilations are not copyrightable regardless of whether created by humans.

- THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No." https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#496

Post by hxtk »

Aerroon wrote: post #159
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…

Copyright isn't some natural state of being though, it's something that's granted to people by the government to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". If copyright hinders things then I think it's reasonable that exceptions would be made.

This analysis yields very different results under utilitarianism vs rule utilitarianism.

Under the former, you could argue, "What I'm doing is a science or useful art, so if copyright exists to advance those things then taking a more permissive interpretation of copyright to allow my efforts to succeed is in the spirit of the law."

Under the latter, you could argue, "Works get published because as a rule, researchers and artists know they have lawful recourse through copyright if the work gets used without their consent. The absence of that rule incentivizes safeguarding works by treating them as secret and each disclosure as a matter of personal trust, so the existence of that rule promotes the sciences and useful arts."

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#497

Post by dredmorbius »

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…

That's not what's been established to date in US caselaw:

THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No."

https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#498

Post by alchemism »

consp wrote: post #420
21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #410

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.

Ah the infamous "no I wrote it myself" submission in university coursework. Usually gets you a free visit to the guidance counsel and a bonus free mark (on your three strikes and you are out plagiarism form).

Not with the way the ultrarich ones do it the old-fashioned way - paying a few people very well. Shows executive potential, after all.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#499

Post by alchemism »

NewsaHackO wrote: post #319
jacquesm wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not how that works. You warrant you wrote the code yourself, then it is found your code infringes on code owned by other entities. Now you have a tough choice: admit you lied about writing your code yourself tainting all of the code you claim you wrote since these tools became available or stand and take the infringement penalty which could be very substantial. Judges and courts don't like playing silly games…

>I've sued two parties for copyright infringement and won and a third settled out of court for a substantial sum. You don't tell a judge you don't need to prove you wrote the code, that's an automatic loss. Then there are such things as expert witnesses who will interview you and check how much you know about the code you claim you wrote. This doesn't really make sense; in no way can an "expert" interview definitivel…

I’ve done temp. transcription for grey hat medical “expert witnesses” who are paid by innocent and guilty alike, fwiw - mercenaries.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#500

Post by matheusmoreira »

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.

And what exactly does it mean to "direct" how the work is constructed?

If I enter dark factory mode and go live my life while it churns tokens, then it's not copyrightable, but if I interact with it at every turn, then it is?

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