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Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

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Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#551

Post by p_l »

alok-g wrote: post #388
p_l wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is in fact correct. Both the compiler (in absence of inclusion of copyrighted libraries) and the LLM are considered to not add creative work and thus do not change copyright status of the works they transform. You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries and the level of copyright from them applying to final output to be how much can be directly considered derivative,…

>> You can consider the training set of the LLM or other AI model to be 3rd party libraries ... I like this comparison -- training set as '3rd party libraries'. Except, of course, that the authors behind the training set may not have actually granted permission to use, whereas the 3rd party libraries usually have some permission by way of license.

The law only cares about how the work is distributed - if you acquired it legally by purchasing, yes you can train LLM on it, and with exception of moral rights in places like EU the author does not have more to say on it.

It's treated the same as human reading and learning from the work.

You have only the granted artificial monopoly on acts of distribution under US law

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#552

Post by p_l »

gspr wrote: post #403
p_l wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did not grant human exemptions in copyright law. We gave certain temporary monopoly on certain uses to humans under rules little understood by laymen even if their livelihood depends on it.

... and from that temporary monopoly humans have exemptions (critique, inspiration, etc.)

It's generally less an exemption and more a constraint on the monopoly, at least in spirit of the law

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#553

Post by sylware »

21asdffdsa12 wrote: post #548
streetfighter64 wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems like way more effort reading the linux code, copying and adapting it to windows, and actively "hiding" it, than just writing code that fits your situation from the get go. 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…

If you write from scratch, you reintroduce "solve" problems. Which it is why its https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/04/06/things-you-should-...

Yep, that's why in many cases it is better to refactor already tested and debugged code.

Additionnally, the size of the code base increases the difficulty to spot 'obviously' refactored code from open source projects. There is a code complexity thresold. Coding AIs could help?

The only protection would be the honnesty of microsoft coders... wait, did I say "honnesty" and "microsoft coders" in the same sentence?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#554

Post by akazantsev »

d0mine wrote: post #541
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

Here's github statistics from 2015 https://github.blog/open-source/open-source-license-usage-on... MIT is used by more projects than GPL.

That's the wrong metric, however. Thousands of small pet repos are unlikely to have more code than a single Chromium repo (mostly LGPL), Linux, Qt, etc.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#555

Post by NewsaHackO »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #544
NewsaHackO wrote: post #494

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.?

Yes, that is their point. Do you have evidence against it? I'm sure you can find some overlap, but I bet the vast majority is caused by people making a distinction between commercial and noncommercial piracy. I don't think there's a big cohort of piracy hypocrites.

Due to the nature of the argument, of course I do not have evidence for or against it. However, I am willing to leave it at that, because I think that any rational observer will be able to look at the general mood toward copyright/privacy online (including using Limewire back in the day, pirating movies, downloading Photoshop etc.) and come to their own conclusion whether or not it's plausible that there isn't a significant overlap between the two.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#556

Post by changyou »

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…

[dead]

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#557

Post by cestith »

superfrank wrote: post #549
cestith wrote: post #515

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> If you’re copying or making substantially derivative works of them outside the terms of the license, you’re violating the copyright I don't disagree with that. What I'm saying is that the judge ruled that training a model using copyrighted books wasn't derivative. It was transformative, so the training wasn't a copyright violation. He then went on to say that the way Anthropic acquired and handled that material was…

That was one case in front of one judge. It’s weak precedent if it’s precedent at all.

Also, the reasoning behind it being transformative instead of derivative is that the output isn’t supposed to be large, unchanged chunks of the input. There’s no actual guarantee your small model run under OpenClaw won’t recreate whole modules of the input.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#558

Post by DrewADesign »

bluGill wrote: post #491
DrewADesign wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

And you’re saying the SC not taking up the issue has no effect on the weight of that non-binding citation in their argument, even if it was effectively the same situation in a different jurisdiction? The argument was that because the decision only had precedent in that circuit, the fact that the SC did not take the issue up has zero effect on decisions outside of that jurisdiction, even for essentially the same situation. If that’s what you’re arguing, I don’t buy it.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#559

Post by type0 »

pessimizer wrote: post #524
numbsafari wrote: post #474

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Basically all GPL code is available on the web

Basically true if you add "to paying customers", there's no obligation to publish it otherwise. You can even sell your GPL software on DVD if you like.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#560

Post by dang »

alienll wrote: post #540
dang wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comments are getting classified by our software as LLM-generated or (more likely) LLM-edited. It's impossible to be certain, of course, but if this is the case—can you please not do this? It's not allowed here - see https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079 . LLMs are amazing of course and we use them heavily ourselves - but not for modifying tex…

Wow, yes sir! I was using Claude to write faster. But I understand. Thanks for the note.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47965543 got classified the same way. Is that accurate?
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