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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#51

Post by ModernMech »

Luker88 wrote: post #19
jhbadger wrote: post #3

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…

No such assumption is made in the article. Nor does it give a single answer. Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code. In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts. Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations. The only one that accepts copyright for…

Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#52

Post by conartist6 »

wongarsu wrote: post #42
conartist6 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion. Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely? There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellect…

The catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.

Well if the camera in addition to choosing autoexposure also decided how to frame the shots, which lens to use, where to stand, and everything else salient to the artistry of photography -- all without direct human intervention, then I would think the situation would again be analogous. If the camera could do all that because an intern was holding it, the intern would still own the shots even if their employer gave them the assignment.

That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#53

Post by palata »

One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet?

Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#54

Post by tommy29tmar »

Maybe the useful test is not “who wrote this line?” but “can you show how it went from requirement/prompt/context to diff to human review/tests?” If you can’t, ownership is only one issue. You also can’t tell what was accepted as engineering work versus just copied output.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#55

Post by BlackFly »

palata wrote: post #53

One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet? Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?

A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#56

Post by ModernMech »

brianwawok wrote: post #6
jhbadger wrote: post #3

This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. But you don't, in my experience. And that generates a new work fully copyrightable even if the original wasn't. Just like how the fad a decade or so ago of taking Tolstoy and Jane Austen works and adding new elements -- "Android Karenina" and "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" are copyrighted works even if the majority of the text in them was from…

You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.

AI to write - code is buggy and not what I asked for

AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding

AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed

AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote

AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#57

Post by ModernMech »

palata wrote: post #53

One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet? Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?

Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#59

Post by cillian64 »

palata wrote: post #53

One question I have is this: if an employee produces code predominantly generated by AI, it means that it is not copyrightable. Does that mean that the employee can take that code and publish it on the Internet? Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?

To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#60

Post by senaevren »

bearjaws wrote: post #39

Article is incredibly fear mongering. Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff. Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas. In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for ste…

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