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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?

#81

Post by palata »

cillian64 wrote: post #59
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.

Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.

If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#82

Post by palata »

senaevren wrote: post #64
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?

That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is…

So employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#83

Post by sarchertech »

bko wrote: post #8

This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution. This comes up in a few places as a kind of vin…

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable

Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#84

Post by rasz »

senaevren wrote: post #61
jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If…

Work-for-hire doctrine doesnt automagically absolve you from IP law. Microsoft and Intel already learned this in the nineties when they paid San Francisco Canyon Company to steal Apple code.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company

LLMs are just code stealers, will gladly generate Carmacks inverse for you with original comments.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#85

Post by mzl »

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…

If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.

As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses

> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#86

Post by gchamonlive »

ninkendo wrote: post #49
gchamonlive wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged. How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%? That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.

> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest. Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does . Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the four…

EDIT: I changed my argument completely.

That makes no sense because what if you refactor your code ad infinitum using AI? You spin up a working implementation, then read through the code, catalog the changes like interface, docs, code quality and patterns and delegate to the AI to write what you would.

It's 100% AI code and it's 100% human code. That distinction is what's counterproductive.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#87

Post by beej71 »

sarchertech wrote: post #78
ModernMech wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Yeah if you have a copyright on the character, the AI generated image doesn’t change that. It doesn’t give you more of less protection than you already had.

IANAL but this sounds more like trademark territory.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#88

Post by beej71 »

jugg1es wrote: post #4

I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.

I love that genAI art will not be copyrightable and genAI code will be. The power of the Almighty Dollar at work.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#89

Post by zvr »

senaevren wrote: post #64
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?

That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is…

Yes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you". Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.

Re: Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

#90

Post by zvr »

skadge wrote: post #11

This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?

Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.
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