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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#521

Post by yason »

nicoburns wrote: post #47
p0w3n3d wrote: post #40

That's quite impressive approach from the companies' perspective. Let's first use claude code and then we'll think who the code belongs to. I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people. First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code. Second…

> Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE. Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when…

On the other hand, separating FE and BE between two teams, necessitating proper interfaces, can often be considered a feature.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#522

Post by fsckboy »

comonoid wrote: post #390
Culonavirus wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I wonder when my manager "prompts" me "I want the feature X and I want it fast", is his prompt a human creativity?

his prompt might be the result of human creativity but even in that case it's more than likely not to be a copyrightable expression of human creativity.

a copyrightable expression of human creativity in that case would need to be substantial enough in size to carry an imprint exlusive to your boss.

"why'd the chicken cross the road? to get to the other side" is not copyrightable. you can dress it up all you want, "why didst thy chickencock traverseth thee highway?..." etc would not qualify as something that would be exclusively yours/your bosses, because that trick is still rote.

BUT:

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways I like to see you work.

I love thee to the depth and breadth and height and number of your pull requests

My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight of your overnight toils

For the ends of being and ideal grace you provide me when you ship!

(i'm just extending each line of Elizabeth Barrett Browning https://poets.org/poem/how-do-i-love-thee-sonnet-43 )

that would be copyrightable if it was original to your boss.

The law and interpretation of the law does not have the tidy and necessary obsession with fencepost errors and corner cases. It deals with them by stepping back and saying "what would an ordinary person think should be copyrightable vs what would be more akin to the wordgames that clever nerds on the playground get beat up for?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#523

Post by yason »

alok-g wrote: post #373
jacquesm wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another, the kind of thing that has been ruled copyrightable since copyright exists. The same goes for translations from one human language into another, and anybody with knowledge of more than one language will be happy to acknowledge that trans…

>> No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product. I think I may have misunderstood your original comment above. It seems intending to say: No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not necessarily on the work product. The human may partially have copyright over the work product as well, "how much" being dependent on how much new creative expression from the human was involved vs that…

What is interesting is that I used to write a program and get a binary executable back from the compiler and I'd have copyright on the source and on the binary. Now I write a prompt and get a binary executable back from Claude and I have copyright on the prompt but depending on my creativity I might be able to have copyright on parts of the output binary. The questions remain: how much, which parts and how the hell could anyone ever tell. This really puts the color of the bits through a vat of dying solution.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#524

Post by pessimizer »

numbsafari wrote: post #474
vablings wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I would have assumed the opposite is true. Do you have any data to back that up?

You would assume that there is more proprietary code available to read on the internet than GPL code? Do you have any rationale for that assumption?

Basically all GPL code is available on the web and there is a vast amount of it. I barely see any current non-FOSS code on the internet, although I think it would be fair to count the big projects who have been using pseudo-OSS licenses lately as proprietary. Wouldn't a safer assumption be a ratio of 10:1 or 100:1 for lines of GPL vs. lines of "shared source?"

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#525

Post by pessimizer »

tensor wrote: post #136
nadermx wrote: post #124

Earlier 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.

"Learning" for LLMs is just as goofy and propagandistic a metaphor as "stealing" for copyright. I find it predictive of your position that you'll accept one dumb metaphor for something that we didn't need a metaphor for, but not the other.

Are you for stealing and against learning?

We know exactly what is happening in both cases. We can talk about that, or we can use obfuscating euphemisms that make our preferred position seem obviously true.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#526

Post by embedding-shape »

thyrsus wrote: post #282
embedding-shape wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Code from pirated text books Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.

I've seen copyright notices that explicitly forbid use for AI training. Would this "transformation" argument still hold in such cases? For example: No Generative AI Training Use For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and grants no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to spe…

Only if you also manage to purchase and destroy the source material, I suppose? In Anthropics case it wouldn't have worked if they've stolen/rented the books then destroyed them, but in the judge's eyes it was legal because legally purchased -> destroyed.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#527

Post by xmcp123 »

_flux wrote: post #21

I think it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input. After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.

This is actually the opposite of what the copyright office has said. Directly addressing AI generated code/prompts, they compared it to someone who is commissioning art, describing to the artist what they want.

The copyright falls to the artist, not the person commissioning it.

Complicated in this case, because there is no artist.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#528

Post by reliablereason »

freejazz wrote: post #512
reliablereason wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Okay. If it made it, it made it. That is true in a deductible way. If p, then p.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#529

Post by everforward »

d0100 wrote: post #339
everforward wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative. Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They…

The trick is to constrain the LLM to program in a very defined coding style If I make the LLM generate code that follows my own code architecture and style, that should be enough creative input

Possibly; I'm not going to hazard a guess on what the Supreme Court will decide the exact bar is. I just don't think it will be either extreme. "Nothing is copyrighted" is too damaging to the economy, "everything is copyrighted" has weird impacts on non-LLM copyrights that conflict with precedent.
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