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 public domain sources.
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.
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 vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
if (fromIndex > toIndex)
throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" +
fromIndex +
") > toIndex(" +
toIndex + ")");
if (fromIndex < 0)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);
if (toIndex > arrayLen)
throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);
}
And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
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.
It’s the same as photography. No photographer built the multibillion dollar supply chain for the optics train in a camera, nor did they build the city scape they are enjoying as a background, they simply set the stage and push a button.
Seems to gloss over other kinds of contamination, beyond GPL code. Code from pirated text books, the problem with the entire language model being trained on copyright data, and on the possibility of the training data containing various copyrighted code.
I’m no lawyer but I feel that meta, my employer, wouldn’t be letting us go hog-wild with Claude code if they weren’t completely confident that they fully owned the outputs, whether we change it or not.
Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.
Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.
In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.
Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.
Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?
Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.
Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.
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 - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.
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.
Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.
I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.
people quickly have forgotten: when copilot was announced, there were warnings not to use it for company code because of the license attribution problem. so what's changed? that anthropic is willing to defend and indemnify?
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?
Maybe the useful test is not “who wrote this line?” but “can you show how it went from requirement/prompt/context to diff to human review/tests?” If you can’t, ownership is only one issue. You also can’t tell what was accepted as engineering work versus just copied output.
Nobody disputes that I own the copyright in a sound recording I made just by pushing the red button on my recorder. So it is a mystery to me that copyright to any sort of human conditioned machine generation is in dispute.
The elephant in the room, of course, is what constitutes “meaningful human authorship.” However, I cannot shake off the feeling that all user interactions with these AI models are being logged. Perhaps this may turn out to be the bigger concern in a potential legal battle than code authorship.
"if Claude was trained on the LGPL-licensed codebase and its output reflects patterns learned from that code, can the output be treated as license-free? The emerging legal consensus is probably not, and assuming it can creates significant liability for anyone shipping that code commercially."
Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet
IMO this is the greatest argument against AI as technofascism. The general public seems to believe that AI will usher in technofascism by claiming corporate ownership of AI output: the independent entrepreneur will be unable to compete against the corporations compute, every piece of data about you will be stolen and monetized by AI, and you will own nothing.
But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the privatization trend that the West has been going through for the last 400 years. All of our copyright laws rely on the idea that there is a human consciousness behind the copyright. The more AI has input, the less we can claim ownership. If AI returns everything to the commons, then it results in a much more egalitarian world.
Hilariously, many people, especially artists, see the return of the commons as an assault against them. They’re so captured by copyright that they assume any infringement on their copyright is inherently fascist. It’s ridiculous. Copyright is a corporations number 1 weapon when it comes to creating a moat and keeping the masses out.
The original intent of copyright, in fact, was an incentive to return an idea to the commons. Experts used to hide their discoveries in order to keep them for themselves. Copyright provided an opportunity to release this knowledge and still profit. There were even several cases where it was established that those who claimed copyright could retain copyright even if the idea had been previously discovered. This created a huge incentive: release the knowledge or risk having your process copyrighted by the opposition. But that system worked because copyright could only exist for so long (14 years, doubled if they filed again.)
Now copyright is a lifelong sentence at almost 100 years. The entire purpose of it has been undermined. Corporations own all your childhood and by the time you can profit off of it, it’s outdated.
A world where the mainstream is primarily a commons seems to me like an egalitarian world. I’d like to live in that world.
I think it's pretty clear cut, whoever is paying for your agentic coding tool subscription is part of the litmus test.
I use my own computer, I pay for my own subscription and I build my open source projects then the code belongs to me.
If I use my company's computer, they pay for my subscription and we work on the company's projects then the code belongs to the company.
In any step of the way if some copy-left or any other form of exotic open source license is violated, who pays for discovery? Is it someone in Russia who created a popular OSS library that is now owed? How will it be enforced?
My opinion, copyright has mattered very little in the corporate world. Copyright is effectively meaningless with SaaS, and the compiled software ran on your machine is protected more by technical controls and EULAs. A world where copyright didn't exist for software would look nearly the same for the commercial world. Trade secrets, NDAs, and employment contracts bind workers more than copyright. The only thing that the question of copyright has real world impact is open source, but even then only for more restrictive licenses such as gpl.
What is being licensed by the End User License Agreement (EULA) is the copyright on the code and its artefacts (executable bytes, etc.) - you can't have an EULA without having the copyright to license.
107 comments
[ 0.16 ms ] story [ 1833 ms ] threadThis comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:
> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {
fromIndex + toIndex + ")"); }And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf
If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.
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.
The copyright falls to the artist, not the person commissioning it.
Complicated in this case, because there is no artist.
Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.
Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.
In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.
Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.
Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?
Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.
Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.
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 - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.
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.
Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.
I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.
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?
Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet
The answer is probably "Nobody"!
But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the privatization trend that the West has been going through for the last 400 years. All of our copyright laws rely on the idea that there is a human consciousness behind the copyright. The more AI has input, the less we can claim ownership. If AI returns everything to the commons, then it results in a much more egalitarian world.
Hilariously, many people, especially artists, see the return of the commons as an assault against them. They’re so captured by copyright that they assume any infringement on their copyright is inherently fascist. It’s ridiculous. Copyright is a corporations number 1 weapon when it comes to creating a moat and keeping the masses out.
The original intent of copyright, in fact, was an incentive to return an idea to the commons. Experts used to hide their discoveries in order to keep them for themselves. Copyright provided an opportunity to release this knowledge and still profit. There were even several cases where it was established that those who claimed copyright could retain copyright even if the idea had been previously discovered. This created a huge incentive: release the knowledge or risk having your process copyrighted by the opposition. But that system worked because copyright could only exist for so long (14 years, doubled if they filed again.)
Now copyright is a lifelong sentence at almost 100 years. The entire purpose of it has been undermined. Corporations own all your childhood and by the time you can profit off of it, it’s outdated.
A world where the mainstream is primarily a commons seems to me like an egalitarian world. I’d like to live in that world.
I use my own computer, I pay for my own subscription and I build my open source projects then the code belongs to me.
If I use my company's computer, they pay for my subscription and we work on the company's projects then the code belongs to the company.
In any step of the way if some copy-left or any other form of exotic open source license is violated, who pays for discovery? Is it someone in Russia who created a popular OSS library that is now owed? How will it be enforced?