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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

legallayer.substack.com

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#511

Post by superfrank »

vbarrielle wrote: post #485
dehrmann wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I thought fair use was decided on a case by case basis, and could not be guaranteed? If true, wouldn't that mean that in other cases it could be ruled differently?

I don't have the exact ruling in front of me, but IIRC the judge pretty clearly said that training a model was fair use. IIRC, he declared it "quintessentially transformative".

The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't give them the right to violate copyright in that way.

Google, for example, purchased print versions of their training material and had a small army of employees digitize them and then delete the digital copies when they were done. That hasn't been challenged AFAIK, but would likely have been found to be not a violation. That's I think what was meant by case by case basis.

It's like if someone breaks into my house and I shoot them with my gun, that's very likely self defense, but if I'm not allowed to own a gun, I may still end up in trouble with the law.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#512

Post by freejazz »

reliablereason wrote: post #281
freejazz wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Claude is not a legal entity And? >It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone. No more ridiculous than you posting something you know nothing about. Just because you don't get the copyright doesn't mean claude does. The fact that claude is not a legal entity has no bearing on whether or not you are entitled to a copyright for a work you did not create.

If neither the user or the tool created and is responsible for the text, who is in your mind?

If claude made it, it is not a copyrightable work. There is no copyright for anyone to own.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#513

Post by [deleted] »

reliablereason wrote: post #252
freejazz wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if claude does the writing. MS doesn't write things for you, and if it did, you would not be entitled to a copyright in whatever it wrote for you.

Claude is not a legal entity, it is a software tool that outputs text based on statistics. There is a user that used a tool to create text and that user is the legal entity responsible for the text in any legal way that matters. Anything else would be completely ridiculous given current laws in most countries. It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.

[deleted]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#514

Post by charonn0 »

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…

> 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.

I would say that choosing a tool that makes it infeasible doesn't actually excuse you from doing it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#515

Post by cestith »

superfrank wrote: post #511
vbarrielle wrote: post #485

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought fair use was decided on a case by case basis, and could not be guaranteed? If true, wouldn't that mean that in other cases it could be ruled differently?

I don't have the exact ruling in front of me, but IIRC the judge pretty clearly said that training a model was fair use. IIRC, he declared it "quintessentially transformative". The case by case basis was about acquisition and possession of the copyrighted material. Anthropic pirated a large number of books and illegally stored digital copies of many that they did purchase legally. The training being protected doesn't…

Whether or not you’re pirating and making illegal copies of something depends greatly on the terms under which you’re allowed to make those copies. You can copy GPL-licensed code all day every day so long as you abide by the license. The same is true of the BSD licenses, MIT, ISC, Apache, et cetera.

If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#517

Post by sidewndr46 »

sylware wrote: post #422
streetfighter64 wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

judging from the attribution notices, windows contains a non trivial amount of BSD

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#518

Post by cestith »

charonn0 wrote: post #509
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…

They probably focused on the GPL because of its viral copyleft features.

Do you suspect that an LLM that would recreate a substantial portion of a licensed work would honor any license? Even a 2-clause BSD one?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#519

Post by charonn0 »

cestith wrote: post #518
charonn0 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They probably focused on the GPL because of its viral copyleft features.

Do you suspect that an LLM that would recreate a substantial portion of a licensed work would honor any license? Even a 2-clause BSD one?

Rather, I suspect viral copyleft is why this lawyer is focusing on the the GPL. It's the only(?) FOSS license that can force a proprietary codebase into the open.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#520

Post by panny »

tiku wrote: post #430

So by this logic my auto complete function before Ai also wrote 50% of my code and is not made by me, because I didn't type it. What should matter is intent, the human that gives the orders.

>What should matter is intent, the human that gives the orders.

If you are instructed by your professor to write an application, do you own the copyright or the professor?

Suddenly, you think you own the copyright again. In fact, in every case, you think you own the copyright. Because of your feelings. That's a common opinion here on HN too. You don't have this opinion by any logical stance. Nor by any legal doctrine.

The fact is: Copyright law applies to human authors. AI is not a human.

https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/LSB10922

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