Comment by flutas
2 months ago
I'm also wondering if it's even legally valid?
They constantly love to talk about Claude Code being "100%" being vibe coded...and the US legal system is leaning towards that not being copyrightable.
It could still be a trade secret, but that doesn't fall under a DMCA take down.
You're confused, AI can't itself hold copyright, but the human who triggered the AI to write the code holds the copyright instead.
IIUC, a person can only claim copyright if they have significantly transformed the output. Unaltered LLM output is not copyrightable per US court decisions.
The whole thing is a legal mess. How do you know the LLM did not reproduce existing code? There is an ongoing legal battle in German between GEMA and OpenAI because ChatGPT reproduced parts of existing song lyrics. A court in Munich has found that this violates German copyright law.
I think you're misunderstanding copyright and ownership.
A copyright over code means that ONLY you can use that code, and nobody else; otherwise, you can sue them. For example, if you are an arist, you want to protect your IP this way.
Yes, AI generated code is not copyrightable but so is most code in general. It is very hard to truly get a copyright for a piece of code. But just because you don't have copyright to something doesn't mean it's not your property.
For example, you can buy several movies on DVD and those DVDs will still be your property even though you don't have copyright and if someone does steal those DVDs, it will be considered theft of your property. Similarly, just because the code is AI-generated/not copyrightable, doesn't mean others can just steal it.
Think about it - so many codebases are not legally protected as copyrighted material but are absolutely protected by IP laws and enforced by the companies that own them.
2 replies →
No the human cannot hold the copyright also. They can own the property rights to the code and protect it. It's not like the rule is "AI cannot copyright stuff but humans can" but rather code is rarely copyrighted and in its case, ownership is much more important.
If your code was generated by you and you store it in your system and have property rights over it, you can enforce legal actions even without holding a copyright over the code.
In general, it is kind of weird to want to copyright code. How do you patent a for-loop for example
You can definitely copyright code. I think the English term "copyright" is a bit misleading. In German it is "Urheberrecht" (= author's right), which I think is much clearer.
If you author something, you have the sole copyright. In fact, in Germany you can't even waive your copyright away. However, you can grant licenses for the use of your work.
The difference between copyright and licenses is crucial! By licensing your work, you do not waive your copyright. You still remain the owner. If you publish your code under the GPL and you are the sole author, you can always relicense your code or issue commercial licenses under different terms.
> In general, it is kind of weird to want to copyright code. How do you patent a for-loop for example
There is a fundamental difference between copyright and patents! Patents require a novel technical contribution and they must be granted by a patent office.
“Loop structure for operations in memory”
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9583163B2/en
> How do you patent a for-loop for example
See: https://newsroom.loc.gov/news/copyright-office-releases-part...
This is even worse. My Claude Code instance can theoretically write the same code as your instance for a similar prompt. Why should one of us be able to have the copyright?