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Comments (161)

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  Arcuru
  Personally, I think that the human directing the agent owns the copyright for whatever is produced, but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable with - https://jackson.dev/post/moral-ai-licensing/
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  semiquaver
  > The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection, and that rule is now settled at the highest judicial level available. Misstates the law. Denial of certiorari can happen for many reasons unrelated to the merits and does not settle the issue nationwide.
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  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.
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  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.
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  qsera
  More interesting question is "Who wants to own it"...The answer is probably "Nobody"!
• ottah
  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.
• hmokiguess
  Tangential but I find this an interesting parallel from a few years ago:https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
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  _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.
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  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
• briandw
  Your employer can claim your code if you use their tools to produce it. Nothing new here. This has nothing to do with AI tooling.
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  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
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  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.
• zuzululu
  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?
• mlmonkey
  On a related note, another question: who owns the paper that Claude (or OpenAI) wrote? Should such paper submissions in conferences call out the model(s) used to write the paper itself?
• pfortuny
  You don't but nevertheless you bear the responsibility of making it public (whether in soyrce or binary form). That is what Anthropic would like.
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  Isamu
  Copyright has a lot to do with what we as a society want to protect and encourage. We want to protect an author that put the hours into creating a book, as opposed to the person creating a copy of that work. The person copying can claim they put in work too but the claim is not strong enough to override our preference to protect original authors.Part of the problem with generated works is that it is lower effort like the person copying something. It’s not an activity that demands special protection like original authorship. I believe this is a large part of the reasoning.
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  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.
• 6d6b73
  LLMs are just tools we use. If I program an app in C++, do I not own the rights to the executable because my compiler wrote machine code for me?
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  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.
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  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?
• joshka
  If you want to go much deeper, https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ is particularly good at least on the side of comprehensiveness.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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.
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  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.
• jMyles
  There is no such thing as ownership of a pattern of information. It has been an illusion, and that illusion is now fading.
• threepts
  Whoever pays for the tokens.
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  skadge
  This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?
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  padmabushan
  First answer who owns the model built with public data
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  kouru225
  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.
• whattheheckheck
  Ask chatgpt deep research citing court cases and it shows dark factory swe code are not copyrightable under current precedents.Even steering it with prompts isn't enough. The guy couldn't copyright the image he made with ai, code is no different.Maybe prompts written by humans are copyrightable.Can't wait for the Billionaires to entrench in court they can steal everything for these machines and claim it as their own and maybe even reach for anything that it helps produce. Fuck that
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  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.
• 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.
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  DeathArrow
  I have a wood cutting machine and some wood. Who owns the timber?
• senaevren
  [dead]
• anon
  undefined