> 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…
Furthermore, we shouldn't even be looking to the Supreme Court at all for this. Congress needs to define the laws around AI and copyright. The Supreme Court is likely avoiding cases in the hope that the legislature gets its act together.
Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
501–510 of 570 posts
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is there really likely to be any? The design is very different isn't it? Ghidra with llm plugins is likely at a place a determined person could find out.
Do you really think with that massive amount of open code, some would not be injected in windows kernel (or even .net with mono, or even windows userland with wine)? It is easier to hide it: it is closed source, and they are probably using the same hiding tricks than those used to hide coding AI generated code (usually some level of refactoring to adapt to windows data structures).
In my experience, reading and understanding code takes a lot more time than writing from scratch, so I don't really see what windows developers (assuming they are somewhat competent coders, this assumption may not hold after around 2010 or so) would have to gain by coping from linux.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#503I 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?
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
The music and movie companies have power. They have the funds to bankrupt you with a small army of lawyers. You as an individual do not stand a chance against corporate lawyers. They can destroy your life over fairly minimal and non-violent offenses.
AI companies are backed by the very powerful. They can steal all they want and use the same army of lawyers to bankrupt any small rights holder. The big rights holders go to the same parties and allow it to happen.
Regardless of the actual take on copyright, both methods skullfuck the little guy without power.
People cry foul because, at least in the US, we claim to live in a free country based on equality, yet there is a very obvious caste system of the haves and the havenots.
It errodes the legitimacy of the system. Imagine if for years you see news reports of a mother getting a judgment against her where she owes 100s of thousands because she seeded a Brittany Spears song. Then you suddenly see the same laws that were leveraged to instill fear in you, tossed aside when the rich and powerful say it doesn't count anymore, you're going to cry foul!
It's not a hypocrisy of position on copyright, it's bearing witness to the illegitimacy of the laws they're bound by.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#505it'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…
> But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe. Trade secrets aren't very well protected, though. You can sue the person who leaked/stole your secret, but if others keep sharing it once it is leaked you can do nothing to them.
people here who have not much experience were intellectually trying to reinvent wheels and I wanted to save them time in structuring their arguments. I have been exposed to various tips of the legal iceberg and was thrilled to learn what I learned and trying to pass it on.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#506I 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…
> training the LLM in violation of a license Bartz v. Anthropic found that this is fair use, so the license doesn't play into it.
There are licenses on most software source code. If you redistribute works derived from that code, you must abide by those licenses or you are violating the copyright. That’s what’s meant by “piracy" here.
Now if you have an LLM that has trained on code and learned to actually write new software, only small snippets too short to be protected by copyright should be identical between the training material and the output. However, if you’re getting output that is substantial in size and recognizably derivative from the original that’s an issue that hasn’t yet as far as I’m aware been settled in court. One would hope the major player LLMs don’t copy and paste large functional chunks of existing programs.
It would certainly seem to me that the code you sell after using an LLM should meet the same standards for difference in implementation as if it was written by a human. That should apply to both copyright protection and patent protection.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#507it'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…
yes it is, but that does not make the response by the AI an expression of human creativity and therefore not copyrightable.
If you wrote down your teachings about prompt design and published a book, your expression of your creativity would be copyrightable, but your ideas expressed in the book would not be.
if you-the-creative-human's prompt design was written by you as a computer program, that expression of your ideas would be copyrightable. but other people could just express themselves by typing in what your program does without using your particular expression and would not be stopped by copyright.
it's easy to get in the intellectual weeds questioning this, but just step back to, copyright was intended to give authors an income from their work, without stopping other authors from writing their own works. Everybody gets to write a King Lear play if they want, they just can't copy somebody else's expression of the ideas. What expression is trying to capture is "what makes you different from me, be we alike in most other ways"
as a funny sidelight, the titles of books and movies are not copyrightable nor considered part of the copyrighted work, because they are not considered to, in a sense, "leave enough room to contain expressions of human creativity" although when considered in the larger context might contain creative puns or double meanings that make illuminating sense.
However, the title of a movie may be a trademarked term (like Pokemon, Xformerz, or whatnot) but trademark has a "type" of good or service component (line of business) and the trademark would apply to action figures (dolls) and pajamas (clothing), but not to the film itself.
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#508I 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?
#509I 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…
Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen? Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.
Or is it "plagiarism"?