Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

jhbadger

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.

jugg1es

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.

bko

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. https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

DeathArrow

I have a wood cutting machine and some wood. Who owns the timber?

skadge

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

smashed

The "if you generated the code at work using company tools, it's owned by your employer" affirmation in the article makes no sense to me? If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.

padmabushan

First answer who owns the model built with public data

_flux

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.

mensetmanusman

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.

e12e

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.

daishi55

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.

bearjaws

Article is incredibly fear mongering. 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.

p0w3n3d

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.

palata

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?

tommy29tmar

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.

hackingonempty

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.

joshka

If you want to go much deeper, https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ is particularly good at least on the side of comprehensiveness.

TheFirstNubian

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.

metalcrow

"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

qsera

More interesting question is "Who wants to own it"... The answer is probably "Nobody"!