Who owns the code?

leothetechguy

Personally I don't even want to own my code. If it is useful to others I want them to have the same rights I have to it. Or should I say, In the case of AI, "my" code :)

dvt

Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable but, as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines.

righthand

Well gee golly is it a tool for the author or not? When’s it’s in their favor of 10000x performance increase or some kind of notoriety it’s “I built this!” when it’s time for responsibility it’s “the machine did this”.

wild_egg

I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case. If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP. If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right? I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine? I do not understand.

Retr0id

// © 2026 whoownsthecode.com. All rights reserved. Ironic.

bethekidyouwant

Owning digital things is dumb at best you restrict access to them

mapontosevenths

How long do you think Microsoft, Apple and the other mega-corps will continue to put up with this? All of them have AI code in all of their products. The law will change. Probably soon.

protocolture

AI = No author is so bloody reductionist. The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested. These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.

dingaling911

And if I use an effect in photoshop, do I own the resulting image?

tiahura

Smells like FUD. Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Human authorship is required for copyright, but AI assistance does not itself defeat copyrightability. Unresolved how much human creative involvement is sufficient.

zephen

Who owns the code if you built it with AI? Someone else! All they have to do is show it's close enough to code that was swallowed during training. Songwriters have been successfully sued for many decades for creating songs that are too close to songs that they probably heard. Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.

OutOfHere

This can become an issue for AI-authored GPL-licensed code which then loses the obligation to reclicense a fork as GPL.

yellowapple

Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole. Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.

peesem

the idea that creation of prompt == creation of code that some people are spouting is so dumb. if you ask your friend to write a program it's their program, even if you ask them to make some specific changes afterward. if you replace your friend with an LLM the copyright goes away because computers can't hold copyright. you don't get it just because nobody else has it

demibabs

Who owns the article? (I can’t be the only one who feels like it was written heavily with AI. Slick site design tho)

hnbad

I said this before and got attacked for it but this exact argument has been made in Germany and an important consequence is that this also affects contract work: If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code". As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write. Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.

Supermancho

I, for one, welcome the world where ownership of code is difficult (if not impossible) to prove. It's a small step toward abolishing the abomination of copyrighting code.

SpicyLemonZest

This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.

sscaryterry

Seems like AI coded slop itself .

ddxv

"Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?" This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?