> 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.
> When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way.
Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it.
What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.
Ah the infamous "no I wrote it myself" submission in university coursework. Usually gets you a free visit to the guidance counsel and a bonus free mark (on your three strikes and you are out plagiarism form).
Free water but not electricity? I'll just hook up a generator to the shower...
These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.
Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.
It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship.
You are right that no court has yet ruled that a specific set of human contributions to AI-assisted work was sufficient to establish authorship. What exists is the inverse: the Copyright Office has granted partial registrations where human-authored elements were separated from AI-generated elements, as in Zarya of the Dawn, where the human-written text was protected but the Midjourney images were not. The Allen v. Perlmutter case pending in Colorado is the first direct judicial test of whether iterative prompting and editing can constitute authorship. Until that decision, the positive threshold is genuinely unknown. The piece reflects this in the calibration section at the end, though your point is worth adding to the authorship discussion more explicitly.
But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?
The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.”
Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
Fair and correct. Cert denial means the Court declined to hear the case, not that it endorsed the lower court's reasoning or settled the question nationally. The DC Circuit ruling stands and the Copyright Office's position is consistent, but that is stable doctrine rather than Supreme Court-settled law. Updated the piece to reflect this distinction accurately.
The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position.
Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court.
Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other circuits have ruled and be guided by their reasoning, generally. The fact that the Supreme Court declined to grant cert actually carries weight.
the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.
Fair point and worth being precise about. Cert denial is not meaningless: it leaves the lower court ruling intact, it signals the Court did not find the issue urgent enough to resolve now, and as you note, other circuits will look at the DC Circuit's reasoning. What it does not do is bind other circuits or establish Supreme Court precedent. The distinction matters here because if a Ninth Circuit case involving AI-generated code reaches a different conclusion, that circuit split would be live law regardless of the Thaler cert denial.
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/
Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
Copyright isn't some natural state of being though, it's something that's granted to people by the government to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". If copyright hinders things then I think it's reasonable that exceptions would be made.
If the LLM generates output that a court decides is sufficiently derivative, and especially (but not necessarily) if the LLM was trained on the source material being infringed, then whoever redistributes the derivative output is going to be liable for copyright infringement.
Creation of the LLM itself is transformative, but LLM output which infringes is not.
Is it true then that if someone stole an entire code base from a vibe coded app from a non permissively licensed project and that person claimed that it was derived from an LLM and was not stolen at all that the person who stole the code is not a thief because it came from the same place? Or are they a thief because someone else copyrighted it? How do vibe coders protect themselves not knowing who else has the same derivative code or who holds the copyright first? Or can't they?
Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason?
The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work.
The author can grant authorship and copyright to the commissioner with a contract, but the monkey picture (and others) have solidified that only humans can be granted copyright. Since LLMs aren't human they can't hold copyright, and if the LLM doesn't have legal copyright then they don't have legal rights to assign copyright to you.
It depends on what level of creative control you had over the code.
Code is protected by copyright as a literary work. The method is not protected by copyright, that would be the domain of patents. What's protected are the words.
If you say "Claude, build me a website about X" then you do not have any creative control over the literary work Claude is producing. You just told a machine to write it for you. Nor, like a compiler, is it derivative of any other work that you wrote.
If, on the other hand, you are working jointly with Claude to make specific changes to the code on a line-by-line basis, then you will have no problem claiming copyright over the code. Claude in this case is acting as a tool, but there's still a human making decisions about the code.
In the case where you wrote a bunch of markdown and then told Claude to generate the corresponding code but didn't have any involvement in writing the code itself, you could perhaps claim that the code is a derivative work of the markdown, a court would have to handle that case-by-case basis and evaluate how much control you exerted over the work.
No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.
Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.
but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.
I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent.
When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.
The immediate retort to that is that the LLM is looking at code that wasn't its to read. But I don't think that's a valid objection. Pretty much by definition, everything I've learned from has a copyright on it, and other than my own code on my own time, that copyright is owned by someone else. Much of the code that's built up my understanding has been protected by NDA, or even defense-department classifications: it wasn't mine in any way. But it still informs how I do all my future coding.
By analogy: I'm also an artist, especially since my retirement. My approach to photography was influenced by Ansel Adams, and countless other artists whose works I've seen displayed in museums, or in publications and online. My current approach to painting was inspired by Bob Ross and others, and the teachers who have helped me develop. I've taken pieces of what I've seen in all their work, and all of that comes out in my photos and paintings, to varying degrees.
I've taken ideas from others in code and in art, and produced something (hopefully!) different by combining those bits with my own perspective. I don't think anyone has a claim on my product because of this relationship.
Likewise, I know that many of my successors have learned from my code (heck, I led teams, wrote one book about software development!). And I hope that someday my artwork has developed to the point where there's something in it that's worth someone else's attention to assimilate. I've never for a minute - even decades before the advent of LLMs - hoped or even imagined that my work would remain locked up with me, and that the ideas would follow me to the grave.
As they say, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. None of us would be able to achieve the tiniest fraction of what we have, without assimilating what has come before us. Through many layers of inheritance it's constantly being incorporated in subsequent works.
In a few decades at best, I'll be dead. It probably won't be very long after that when people even forget my name. But the idea that something I've done - my work in developing software systems, or in my photography and painting - will continue to have ripples through time, inspires me and gives me hope that I'll have some tiny shred of immortality beyond my personal demise.
Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled.
I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.
In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time.
The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.
IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.
Scale and the ability to generate a livelihood of your creations and/or the ability to control how what you have created is used, for instance, to demand attribution.
The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise.
I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember.
For another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place.
Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.
Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.
> When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.
You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?
I've created my own DSL, and instruct Claude Code how to generate code for this DSL using skills.
Since this is a new language, and not documented on the web nor on Github, Claude's ability is not based off of stolen IP. At best it's trained on other language concepts, just like we can train ourselves on code on GitHub.
Maybe a good reason to create a new programming language?
Interesting, but I still do not think this is as easy. The AI model is still trained on some existing works, and it is generating code in the new DSL or programming language still based some higher level ideas and expressions it has consumed during training. You have added just one more level of indirection. The output cannot anymore be verbatim copy of some existing work or non-short snippets, however, the output may still carry "expression" that are substantially similar to something pre-existing.
Note: IANAL. The above is just from my current understanding.
The LLM is just a database. It's like saying 'I own the copyright to what comes out of an API because I crafted the query' or 'I own the copyright to the responses I get from the bots on the Starship Titanic because I crafted the message they respond to'.
I could possibly see an argument for the owner being whoever paid for the tokens used, but honestly I think the argument for that is weaker than what you're suggesting; I'm merely playing devil's advocate here.
I don't think there's even a valid argument for any other ownership model, or at least none that I can think of.
I see the argument for whoever paid for the tokens. Or in the case of a free AI usage, the person who sent the prompt (or whoever they are acting on behalf of, i.e. the company they are working for at the time).
The primary issue being that it's all built on stolen data in the first place.
If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.
I agree with this sentiment, because the person directing the agent can still direct it in a way where it'll produce a better or worse output than another person directing it.
This interpretation makes sense. I think even the 'fair use' clause in the US doesn't protect LLMs. One argument I've heard often is that LLMs synthesize their training set to produce novel output in the same way as a human would... That may be the case, but legally an LLM isn't a human. You can't look at the output of an LLM and say that it's 'fair use' with respect to its training set; it hasn't been established that AI has the same 'fair use' right as a human does; it's already pushing it that companies have this right (let alone an AI agent); anyway, that's just one problem... Also, this is ignoring the fact that the researchers who compiled the training set COPIED the original copyrighted data in order to produce that training set. They either copied the entire work into the training set or they fed the entire work directly into the LLM; in either case; at some point, the entire work was copied verbatim into the LLM's input layer before it was ingested by the AI. The researchers copied the copyrighted content without permission.
Also, when it comes to code, the case is even more damning because the vast majority of the code which LLMs are trained on was not only copyright but subject to an MIT license (at best) and even the MIT license, which is the most permissive license in existence, still says clearly:
"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software"
The word 'person' is used very intentionally here.
I think there should be several kinds of AI taxes which should be distributed to all copyright holders. There should be a tax to go to writers (and book authors), a tax to go to open source developers and a tax for the general population to distribute as UBI to account for small-form content like comments and photography...
People invested a lot of time building their entire careers around the assumption of copyright protection; so for it to be violated on such a scale would be a massive betrayal.
I find idea that the code could be copyrightable as weak. There are only so many ways to write a for loop. Similarly you can't copyright schematics (apart from exact visual representation as form of art). Code is just a schematic.
Copyrights already preclude short phrases for the same reason -- there are only so many ways in which short phrases could be produced. The moment a work becomes larger (large enough; AFAIK, the threshold is not precisely defined), the reasoning you applied fails to apply.
The Google-Oracle lawsuit did not decide whether APIs (when large in number) are copyrightable or not.
You can think that's how it should be. But that's not necessarily how it is. I'm reminded of the famous monkey selfie copyright dispute [1]. A photographer set up a camera and gave it to a monkey but after a legal dispute, courts decided nobody owned the copyright.
I can totally see this applying here as well.
Now this doesn't resolve the issue of AIs being trained on copyrighted works it had no rights to. The counterargument is that this is a derivative or transformative work but I don't believe that's settled law at all.
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.
Best part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.
The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.
I have trouble believing that the DMCA claims would be found to be in bad faith when they were made at a time when the question of what degree of human input is required to acquire copyright on AI generate code hasn't been resolved at all.
It doesn't seem like bad faith to think that copyright is stronger than the courts end up thinking, just being mistaken.
Work-for-hire doctrine doesnt automagically absolve you from IP law. Microsoft and Intel already learned this in the nineties when they paid San Francisco Canyon Company to steal Apple code.
As a developer, the fact that my source code passed through a compiler - an automated tool - doesn't give the author of the compiler any claim on my executable code.
As an artist, the fact that I used, e.g., Rebelle to paint a digital painting, or that I used Lightroom (including generative AI to fill, or other ML/AI tools to de-noise and sharpen my image) in editing a photograph, doesn't give EscapeMotion, Adobe, or Topaz, any claims to my product.
Why, then, would there be any chance that use of a tool like Claude - a tool that's super-advanced to be sure, but at the end of the day operates by way of a mathematical algorithms - would confer any claims to Anthropic?
If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable
Is figuring out the appropriate prompts to use in directing Clause qualitatively different than using a (much) higher-level abstraction in coding? That is, there was never any talk as we climbed the abstraction layer from machine code to assembly to Fortran or C to 4GLs to Rust etc., that the assembler/compiler/IDE builder would have any ownership claim on the produced executable. In what sense can Anthropic et al assert that their tool, which just transforms our directives to some lower-level representation, creates ownership of that lower-level representation?
It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
The catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.
They won't want to own code that is malicious\illegal\used in crime, although it's really weird to me that no one (in LEO) seems to care that, for example, grok generates CSAM, revenge porn, probably other illegal things, so they'll probably get to have their cake and eat it too.
Those things have precise legal definitions which it may not be entirely clear that an LLM can even generate them - especially in the USA where the 1st covers things that many would think illegal (and are illegal in other countries).
Too late to edit, but OpenAI certainly doesn't want ownership or liability, for the CSAM they've produced. They certainly don't want ownership/liability of code which does $ONLYAWFULTHING.
Zarya of the Dawn already settled it for Midjourney output: human-written elements were protected, AI-generated images were not. The character design didn't get copyright even though the human picked, prompted, and curated. Code isn't different. Prompting Claude to produce a function is closer to prompting Midjourney to produce a frame than to writing the function yourself.
The reason it feels different to engineers is that we're used to thinking of the compiler as the analogy. But a compiler is deterministic — same input, same output. An LLM isn't. That's the line the Copyright Office is drawing, and image cases got there first.
Depends on the scale of LLM involvement, the copyright office left a pretty big carve out for things that are human sourced and then modified by LLM, or the reverse, LLM output thats modified by human intention. (They had to do this because there are already pseudo random elements to digital artwork, like say, render clouds and render noise, that might otherwise poison an artwork). In fact I dont think this has been tested with Highlight area > Prompt a change to this area of the image workflows.
They also mention in the same document that were LLMs to more closely approximate deterministic tools, they would be open to reevaluating. That is Requesting X gets X without substantial wiggle room.
I dont think that last part has been tested with an extremely large set of prompts and human generated input to create a more deterministic output. Even outside of code, where you see large prompts, creative writing LLM tools, NovelAI or Sudowrite for instance can have pages and pages of spec for the LLM, sometimes close to 50% of the size of the final output.
Then there's testing, review etc, human processes confirming that the output meets spec, updating it where needed intelligently.
There are also foreign courts, with similar rules about human intention, that have found in favor of prompts only, where it could be demonstrated that multiple rounds of prompts were used to refine the image.
I wouldnt call this settled at all tbh. And to be honest, a lot of this doesnt require exposure. you dont need to own up to LLM use in a lot of settings, proving LLM use is so difficult its easy to jump up the ladder from LLM (100%) to LLM (50%) and ultimately claim ownership.
The people who will get busted for this are basically just super lazy leaving ChatGPT responses in, failing to pay an editor, failing to modify images for anything more than layouts.
> But a compiler is deterministic — same input, same output. An LLM isn't.
Temperature 0 determinism is subject to active research. NVIDIA tried but failed so far, DeepSeek V4 seems to have done it. I hope judges won't be swayed by this an AI generated code will classified as uncopyrightable, just like Images are.
Fair point on temp-0. But I don't think determinism is what the courts will hang it on. A deterministic LLM still makes the expressive choices — naming, structure, control flow — that the human didn't make. The image cases didn't turn on whether you could re-roll the same Midjourney frame. They turned on who made the creative decisions. Same logic should hold for code.
But is there anything stopping a human from applying for copyright in their own name? Does the fact that somebody can recreate the prompt invalidate their claim?
Copyright Office requires you to disclose AI involvement and disclaim the AI-generated parts. Zarya of the Dawn is the example — applicant filed for the whole graphic novel, got partial registration on the human-written text, refused on the Midjourney images. The reproducibility of the prompt isn't really the test. The test is whether a human made the expressive choices.
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.
> 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.
Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when it's separate teams.
One of the few things I do kind of like about LLM-assisted coding is that it's helping to bring back "lone wolf" programming. We currently default to using massive teams to build massive software because of all the work involved, but teams have a huge communication/documentation cost, and a lot can leak and be lost the more communication has to happen to get things done. Code assistants cut down on the "all the work involved" part, and I think will help to bring one-man shops back into fashion.
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?
Also, it's supremely easy do the wrong abstractions long term and compromise premature internal designs that will start to starve of human mental modeling, hence explaining with accountability how things work and what the plans are when an incident happens.
Also, if the wrong generalizations are introduced, coded correctly and reviewed and approved by AIs, then who's even driving really?
I rarely see #3 yield better solutions, it's usually better to collaborate as a team on requirements and gotchas, but let one person own implementation.
The fourth point about code commenting is the one that connects directly to the ownership question. When developers write comments to explain intent, those comments are evidence of human creative direction. When Claude writes the code and the comments, and the developer merges without adding their own explanation of the architectural decisions, the record of human authorship disappears along with the institutional knowledge. The documentation problem and the copyright problem are the same problem.
it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.
Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human creativity. Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity, so the balance is tilted in favor of AI generated copy not being copyrightable.
The Supreme Court or legislation could change this, and I'd guess there will be a movement to go in that direction, but till something like that succeeded it's not so.
> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity
I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion of bugs and "basic bitch" solutions, asking for more robust this and edge case that. It felt like I wrote a novel. How is that not creativity (Crayon-eater or Picasso, creativity is creativity)?
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.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
I work in M&A. Nearly every lawyer, accountant, investor, and software business owner thinks their code is solely valuable and a trade secret. I find it hilarious and try to be as diplomatic as possible about why it's not. They also willfully will give their client list to a potential acquirer but get super cagey they moment a third party provider asks for their code to be scanned.
This argument easily gets shut down when I asked why, Twitch, a $1B business didn't crater to their competition when their full codebase was leaked.
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.
So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid.
If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.
The open source licenses are intended as defenses against the people who would otherwise attempt to claim ownership of that code and apply a proprietary license to the code, i.e. exactly what now Anthropic and the like have done, together with their corporate customers.
Of course, if it is accepted that the code generated by an AI coding assistant is not copyrightable, then using it would not really be a violation of the original open source licenses. The problem is that even if this principle is the one accepted legally, at least for now, both Anthropic and their corporate customers appear to assume that they own the copyright for this code that should have been either non-copyrightable or governed by the original licenses of the code used for training.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
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.
>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
Let's say we didn't have assemblers, but instead we would have three professions:
- Specifiers, who make the specification for the system
- Programmers, who write C code
- Machine encoders, that take that C code and write machine code for a CPU
Would it be that the copyright would then belong to programmers, if no other explicit assignments would be made?
---
Thinking about it, probably yes: copyright of the spec belongs to specifies, copyright of the C belong to programmers, and copyright of machine code to machine encoders. Or would it depend on the amount of optimizations the machine encoders would do, i.e. is it creative or not? And then does this relate to the task and copyrightability of C compiler output, where optimizations can sometimes surprise the developer?
Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative.
Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They are the same object to the Copyright Office because one produces the other, in the same way that converting an image to a PDF is still the same copyright.
LLMs don’t do that. The stuff coming in may not be copyrighted, and may not be copyrightable. The stuff that comes out is not a rote series of transformations, there are decisions being made. In common use, running a prompt 10 times might yield 10 meaningfully different results.
I’m dubious the outcome will be “any level of prompting is enough creativity”.
The compiler analogy is the right one to reach for and the Copyright Office addressed it directly: the question is not whether you provided input, it is whether the creative expression in the output reflects human authorship. With a traditional compiler, the programmer authors every expression in the source. With an LLM, the programmer authors the intent and the model makes the expressive decisions about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. Whether that distinction matters legally is what Allen v. Perlmutter is working through right now. The summary judgment briefing completed in early 2026 and it may be the next landmark ruling on exactly this question.
I wrote an R library doing some simple regressions using the GPU, with Claude. I asked it to provide the same API as lm, glm and some other base R functions. It copied their code wholesale without mentioning it to me. So, now my library is GPL… which is not a big deal in this context, but it was quite a shock.
Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich:
1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards?
2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food?
3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law?
By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been exploited in pursuit of my answer.
That’s being charitable, really. In practice the open secret of the AI industry is that the vast majority of training data, for want of a better word even if it is likely to be the most precise description, is stolen data.
Probably, yes, but the burden of proof is with us not them.
I'm already glad some companies have the guts to open their models because proving it for open models is probably a lot easier than for a model behind a service.
The proof is the $stupid-billion infrastructure built and kept up to host mousetraps armed with free cheese made of virtue signalling about doing the right thing and sharing the code with the world for free.
That's a matter of changing a law, it's all up to the people and their representatives. We talk as if everything is set on stone but if there really is a will, there is a way.
The media industry loves to quote ridiculous numbers on lost revenue due to piracy etc. May be a rough ballpark numbers will get them to do something about this theft.
Can someone put a rough estimate on potential revenue loss (direct and incidental) from training AI with industry wise breakup.
It’s wrong to stop progress. I just want to know what data went into my model and have access to the same data. The same way we have national libraries of books but with the caveat that I don’t really know how one is supposed to browse petabytes of OpenAI .zips like I browse old books.
If the data is proprietary (eg Meta’s stash of FB comments) then I am satisfied to be told it’s private and I can’t see it. If, however, the works were public then give me a URL if it’s live or a cached copy if it isn’t.
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.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Anna Karenina is public domain, assuming you’re talking about the original? If you translate it then maybe you could release it under GPL, but bit odd?
You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.
As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses
> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see
> 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.
That's not how copyright works. The modified version is derivative. You can't just take the Linux kernel, make some changes, and slap a new license on it.
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to text. I suspect Winters and his publisher have investigated the legality of this more than either of us have.
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.
> What to preserve:
Commit messages that describe what you changed and why, not just what the AI generated. “Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch” is evidence. “Add rate limiting module” is not.
> The second commit message versus the first is the difference between a defensible authorship claim and a clean “Claude wrote this” record.
That makes no sense to me, as the commit message is probably LLM generated as well. (and even easier to generate as it doesn't have to compile or pass automated tests).
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?
A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.
If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?
That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.
Yes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you".
Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.
So employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?
Depending on the scale. If you ask Clause to one-shot an app from a nebulous description, you get a prototype which you would understandably loathe to own the code of. If you plan carefully and limit the scope, you get code that you understand, can approve of, and are okay owning further down the line.
I spent two and a half hours writing up a detailed outline for a small webapp. Claude popped it out in one shot 100% working., I added features after but the time you spend on a good outline saves hours later.
I think it was tor.com that last year had a story where the newbie hired for the corporate HR dept ended up being the last human left after all others were replaced.
This is a big question that makes my employer nervous about using LLM-generated code, along with the even-more-unresolved question "what happens if the LLM outputs an algorithm that is protected by patent?" (particularly worrying because we know the base training included patent descriptions.) Questionable copyright can often be worked around (particularly since we don't distribute source) but infringing on a patent can destroy a company.
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.
Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap is for developers using personal accounts or consumer plans on side projects, where neither of those documents exists.
I don't understand how a company can have IP copyright rights on code that is inherently uncopyrightable (in the unlikely event scotus rules that way).
The M&A angle is the one that's actually going to force clarity on this. Most companies using AI tooling haven't thought about it at all until a term sheet shows up with an IP rep they can't back up. That's when "who owns this" stops being a philosophy question.
Lawyers I have spoken to have stated strongly that they believe collective works doctrine will provide strong protections for most mature and sizable software. I see no mention of these considerations here.
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.
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
I've seen copyright notices that explicitly forbid use for AI training. Would this "transformation" argument still hold in such cases?
For example:
No Generative AI Training Use
For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and grants no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless individual or entity obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does any individual or entity have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio without Author’s specific and express permission.
They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents?
AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?
The intermingling argument is actually central to the Bartz settlement structure. The settlement required destruction of the pirated dataset specifically because commingled training data creates an unresolvable provenance problem. For deployers building on Claude, EDPB Opinion 28/2024 requires a documented assessment of the foundation model's training data legal basis before deployment. "We cannot tell which outputs came from which source" is not a satisfactory answer to a regulator running that assessment. wrote about it before here: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/i-read-every-edpb-document...
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 sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation.
LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.
Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable.
The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coincide with larger fragments of works that are copyrighted. How weird would it be if that didn't happen?
"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
This sounds like a problem that's pretty easy to get around.
CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around.
And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training.
It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce.
It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you took any precautions to make it even slightly difficult that you did.
Unlike GPL, BSD and Apache licenses do not claim to also cover your non-AI-generated code that only invokes the AI-generated code.
However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.
Therefore, unless the AI model has been trained only on non-copyrighted public-domain code, incorporating the generated code in your application means that you have removed the copyright notices from it, which is not allowed by the original licenses.
There is absolutely no doubt that using an AI coding assistant works around the copyright laws, but it is still equivalent with doing copy and paste with fragments from copyrighted works into your source code.
I consider that copyright should not be applicable to program sources, at least not in its current form, so reusing parts from other programs should be fair use, but only if human programmers would be allowed to do the same.
With sufficient obfuscation (which models seem to provide intrinsically), how would anyone know to sue? On top of that, only the most major sorts of litigation have the legal force to pierce even the flimsiest of obfuscation... this is likely all moot.
If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.
The chardet dispute is the closest thing to an active test case on this specific question, and you are right that it has not resolved into settled law. "Emerging legal consensus" was imprecise. The more accurate framing is: the legal community's working assumption, based on how copyright doctrine treats derivative works, is that training-data provenance travels with the output. That assumption has not been tested definitively in court yet.
Why should it be any different than it ever was? If a release manager checked it but didn’t catch the vulnerability, they have some culpability. If the developer shipped the code without checking it, they have some culpability too. Ultimately, if they both work under an organization that they report to, they’re responsible to that organization, which is, in turn, accountable to its customers (and investors perhaps.)
> Code that Claude Code or Cursor generated and you accepted without meaningful modification may not be copyrightable by anyone.
Except if it happens to regurgitate a significant excerpt of some existing work, then the authors of that can assert their copyright; i.e. claim that it infringes.
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.
The meaningful human authorship question is the elephant, agreed, and the regulators have deliberately refused to quantify it for exactly the reason you describe any bright line number becomes a target to game rather than a standard to meet.
The logging point is sharper than it might appear. In a copyright dispute over AI-assisted code, interaction logs could cut both ways. A plaintiff trying to establish human authorship would want the logs to show substantial architectural redirection, multiple rejections of Claude output, and documented reasoning for structural decisions. A defendant challenging that authorship claim would subpoena the same logs to show verbatim acceptance of output without modification.
The practical implication i guess here,that the developers who want to preserve a copyright claim over AI-assisted code should treat their prompt history as a legal document from the start. It seems all over the world the logs are the evidence. Whether they help or hurt depends entirely on what they show.
The bit about treating one’s prompt history as a legal document has really struck a nerve with me. I’ve been keeping a separate git history solely for my prompts. Initially, the goals were simple: reuse prompts, turn some into skills, etc. But in light of the insights from the article and the discussions here, I need to treat this practice as serious business.
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?
Did Claude Code not start out as human input? Would it not be safe to say that a reasonable amount of it is still human input? But also, just because its mysteriously "not theirs" doesn't mean they magically have to give you the code.
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.
Claude is not a legal entity, it is a software tool that outputs text based on statistics. There is a user that used a tool to create text and that user is the legal entity responsible for the text in any legal way that matters.
Anything else would be completely ridiculous given current laws in most countries.
It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.
Good overview of the issues. I'm sure there are a few nits to pick with that.
But something that is overlooked is that the world is bigger than the US and it's an absolute zoo out there in terms of copyright laws in different countries. Anything you think you might understand about this topic goes out of the window if you have international customers or provide software services outside the US. Or are not actually based there to begin with. And there are treaties between countries to consider as well.
Courts tend to try to be consistent with previous rulings, interpretations, etc. When it comes to copyright, there are a few centuries of such rulings. The commonly held opinions among developers that aren't lawyers are that AI is somehow different. And of course since the law hasn't actually changed, the simple legal question then becomes "How?". And the answer to that seems to involve a lot of different notions.
For example, "AIs are not people, and therefore any content produced by them isn't covered by copyright to begin with" is one of the notions brought up in the article. A lawyer might have some legal nits to pick with that one but it seems to broadly be the common interpretation. So AI's don't violate copyright by doing what they do. In the same way you can't charge a Xerox machine with copyright infringements. Or Xerox. But you could go after a person using one.
And another notion is that any content distributed by a human can be infringing on somebody else's copyright and that party can try to argue their case in a court and ask for compensation. Note that that sentence doesn't involve the word AI in any way. How the infringing party creates/copies the content is actually irrelevant. Either it infringes or it doesn't. You could be using AI, a Tibetan Monk copying things by hand, trained monkeys hitting the keyboard randomly, a photo copier, or whatever. It does not really matter from a legal point of view. All that matters is that you somehow obtained a copy of an apparently copyrighted work. AI is just yet another way to create copies and not in any way special here.
There are of course lots of legal fine points to make to how models are trained, how training data is handled, etc. But if you break each of those down it boils down to "this large blob of random numbers doesn't really resemble the shape or form of some copyrighted thing" and "Anthropic used dodgy means to get their hands on copies of copyrighted work". I actually received a letter inviting me to claim some money back from them recently, like many other copyright holders.
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.
This is actually closer to how the Copyright Office thinks about it than the article makes clear. The registration guidance that emerged from the Thaler proceedings specifically asks applicants to describe the human creative contributions and how the AI was used. A documented workflow showing requirement, architectural decision, rejection of AI output, human restructuring, and review creates a paper trail that maps directly onto what the Office looks for. The can you show how it got here test you are describing is the practical version of the legal standard.
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?
Copyright law kind of transcends national borders by certain international treaties like the Berne Convention. Which is why the US copyright holders could enforce their "woulnd't steal a car" threats in Europe.
Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.
It seems that author unironically advises to write your commit messages like this: "Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch", to have a chance at defense in potential court hearing. I find it funny, if vindicating for my personal approach. If the expectation is to "restructure, reject, rewrite" what "AI" spits out, why use "AI" at all at this point???
The model ownership question and the output ownership question run on separate legal tracks and the piece focuses on the second deliberately. On the first: the model weights are owned by Anthropic under work-for-hire from their engineers regardless of what the training data contained. Training data copyright infringement is a separate tort claim against Anthropic, not a basis for anyone else to claim ownership of the model. The Bartz settlement resolved the pirated books claim without disturbing Anthropic's ownership of the weights. Owning the training data does not give you ownership of the model trained on it, any more than owning the paint gives you ownership of the painting.
I'm still flabbergasted that people – and big, visible companies with big targets on their backs – choose to keep on using the output of LLMs without having an answer to these questions.
And I'm worried that once that has been sufficiently normalized, laws and interpretations of them will adapt to whatever best suits those users. Which will mean copyrightwashing of FOSS. My only hope then is that surely if free software can be copyright-washed by the big guys, then so can the little guy copyright-wash the big guys' blockbuster movies or whatever, which might lead to some sort of reckoning.
The idea that the provenance of a given tool's code inherently pollutes the material it's used with seems kind of illogical. Wouldn't it follow from this premise that any code written using open source IDEs and debugged with open source debuggers and other tooling would itself then be considered copyleft? Are works written with LibreOffice not copyrightable?
There's obviously a huge issue with the legitimacy and ownership of training data being fed to LLMs. That seems like an issue between the owners of that IP and the people training the models and selling them as services more than the people using the tool. Isn't this just another flavor of SCO trying to extort money out of companies using Linux?
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.
The original bargain you describe, limited term in exchange for public disclosure, is exactly what makes the current situation strange. If AI-generated output falls into the public domain immediately, that is actually closer to the original intent of copyright than 95-year terms. The legal question is whether that outcome happens by design or by accident, and what it means for the people building products on top of AI-generated codebases right now.
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.
AI is a monster to our current copyright system - monster in the philosophical sense, that is, an example that destroys the concept.
First, its creation is (claimed to be) extremely useful for society, but in order to be created it requires ignoring copyright for pretty much everything ever written. Something we kinda shrugged under the table.
Then, it introduces an extreme jump down in creation effort - so if the focus is protection of effortful creation, nothing with AI use qualifies. But of course, you'd want society to benefit from effortlessness in general, spending more effort than needed in a task is the opposite of efficiency.
What if no meaningful thought was put into the code (entirely vibe-coded slop), but it’s made for your employer? Shouldn’t the work be uncopyrightable?
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.
On that matter, wouldn't an AI flag for submissions help hn? I wouldn't flag a submission for LLM style as it is too harsh, but I don't want to read them -- if only because I don't like LLM prose.
There are so many submissions where most of the discussion is about whether the content has any human effort behind, or the LLM was just a purely assistive role like translating. It's really devaluing hn, IMO.
Not sure how much an AI flag would help, or introduce new issues, given how difficult the problem is, though.
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
50(1) states that AI systems which interact directly with public must inform that they are interacting with AI system.
50(2) states that AI generated synthetic audio, image, video or text content must be marked as such. However this requirement applies to "providers" of AI systems. And according Article 1(3) that is:
> ‘provider’ means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge;
So it sounds like it would apply to e.g. Anthropic via Claude Code, not to users of Claude Code.
It's also unclear if this would apply to the compiled output or not.
No one really cares about EU law. Even the EU itself if it's inconvenient. Hell half their government website still don't comply with GDPR (probably almost all if you don't conveniently ignore the USA shield act).
They'll fine some USA companies and we'll end up with another cookie banner at the start of every piece of software and some random hacker news user will claim that's absolutely not what the law wants or needs but everyone will settle on it even the website's of bureaucracy that made the law.
Is code content though? This would seem more applicable to video where people are being deceived by AI content masking as real. Rather than internal application code.
Misstates the law. Denial of certiorari can happen for many reasons unrelated to the merits and does not settle the issue nationwide.
From TFA:
> When the Supreme Court declined to hear the Thaler appeal in March 2026, it did not endorse the lower court's reasoning or settle the question nationally. Cert denial means the Court chose not to hear the case, nothing more. What it does mean is that the DC Circuit's ruling stands, the Copyright Office's position is intact, and no court has yet gone the other way.
Your quoted text is no longer in TFA.
Because the author acted on that comment.
c.f. OP’s comments in this thread.
Lets hire humans as pAIrrots? They see it, they rearrange it, they rename variables and then they "authored" it. What a job- to start for as junior, but if you understand whats happening, you may augment the AIs code by giving "feedback" with enough time.
Ah the infamous "no I wrote it myself" submission in university coursework. Usually gets you a free visit to the guidance counsel and a bonus free mark (on your three strikes and you are out plagiarism form).
Free water but not electricity? I'll just hook up a generator to the shower...
These sorts of simplistic loopholes rarely work. Imagine if you could get copyright for the linux kernel by just rearranging it and renaming a few variables.
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Also, I don't think there is any example testing the conclusion. There is no case to point at that any of the factors they listed are sufficient to convey authorship. Would love to be pointed to a case where rejecting decisions and redirecting to a different approach was deemed human authorship. What we do know is that you can disclaim the part of the code a human didn't author. In fact, the Copyright Office requires you disclose and disclaim. If anyone out there has more factual and citable sources please share.
It's in fact the opposite from what I've read. In one of the supreme court cases cited by the copyright office itself in its opinion of AI works (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) it is deemed that just you advising something to do the work for you, giving criticisms and revisions, isn't enough for authorship or co-authorship.
While it's not code related, the copyright office's opinion is a good read and I don't see any reason to believe it's opinion is different for works of text vs works of physical art: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
You are right that no court has yet ruled that a specific set of human contributions to AI-assisted work was sufficient to establish authorship. What exists is the inverse: the Copyright Office has granted partial registrations where human-authored elements were separated from AI-generated elements, as in Zarya of the Dawn, where the human-written text was protected but the Midjourney images were not. The Allen v. Perlmutter case pending in Colorado is the first direct judicial test of whether iterative prompting and editing can constitute authorship. Until that decision, the positive threshold is genuinely unknown. The piece reflects this in the calibration section at the end, though your point is worth adding to the authorship discussion more explicitly.
> meaningful human authorship
How is this defined? Is my code review "meaningful" ? Are my amendments and edits to the generated code "human authorship" ?
From the article:
> Specifying an objective to the model is not enough. Directing how the work is constructed is what counts.
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read the article?
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But it means that the appellate decision will retain precedence, no? Wouldn’t losing precedence be the primary legal effect of overturning that decision? All case law that hasn’t touched the Supreme Court could theoretically be challenged, but most of it isn’t, and it’s considered the law until it isn’t anymore, right? How would this be any different?
The decision is binding only within the jurisdiction of the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
So it’s not correct to say “because SCOTUS denied cert, Thaler is now binding national copyright law.”
Practically speaking, it is binding on the US Copyright office (one of the parties in the case) in CADC. And that’s important. But copyright litigation happens all across the country, while this ruling only directly constrains the relatively small number of cases within CADC.
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Fair and correct. Cert denial means the Court declined to hear the case, not that it endorsed the lower court's reasoning or settled the question nationally. The DC Circuit ruling stands and the Copyright Office's position is consistent, but that is stable doctrine rather than Supreme Court-settled law. Updated the piece to reflect this distinction accurately.
Since this is a tech audience... the Supreme Court uses a bounded priority queue. An unbounded queue would risk growing impractically large.
There are some kinds of cases where the Court has "original jurisdiction," meaning they must hear them, but those are very rare.
It does settle the law in as far as maintaining the status quo.
The Supreme Court declining to take up an issue is taking a position.
Now different circuits can take a different view of the same issue. This is a common reason why the Supreme Court will grant cert: to resolve a circuit split. Appeals court judges know this and have at times (allegedly) intentnionally split to force an issue to the Supreme Court.
Even without settling the issue appeals courts will look at how other circuits have ruled and be guided by their reasoning, generally. The fact that the Supreme Court declined to grant cert actually carries weight.
No it is not.
United States v. Carver, 260 U. S. 482, 490 (1923).
Moreover, SCOTUS does not decide issues, they decide cases.
Upjohn Co. v. United States, 449 U. S. 383, 386 (1981).
the real issue is that the Thaler case was a different question: "Can AI be an author?" and the lower Court said no and SCOTUS left it along. But the question of "what is enough for the human to be the author" wasn't even part of the case. That is completely own checked.
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Fair point and worth being precise about. Cert denial is not meaningless: it leaves the lower court ruling intact, it signals the Court did not find the issue urgent enough to resolve now, and as you note, other circuits will look at the DC Circuit's reasoning. What it does not do is bind other circuits or establish Supreme Court precedent. The distinction matters here because if a Ninth Circuit case involving AI-generated code reaches a different conclusion, that circuit split would be live law regardless of the Thaler cert denial.
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/
Funny how the copyright industry was able to spin copyright infringment into the pejorative "stealing". If you still have the item, what was stolen?
Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207 (1985): The Supreme Court ruled that the unauthorized sale of phonorecords of copyrighted musical compositions does not constitute "stolen, converted or taken by fraud" goods under the National Stolen Property Act
I still find the idea that "learning" from code is "stealing" kind of ridiculous.
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Everybody has had a complete 180 in terms of copyright protections. Before, nobody cared about downloading music, movies, TV shows, or pirating games. Now, when the copyright law is affecting them, they are gungho about protecting these billion-dollar companies' copyrights.
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I don't think it's unreasonable to consider it stolen potential profit, but agreed that's not how they spin it
“Stolen” as in “profited on IP against terms and conditions of the license”.
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Copyright isn't some natural state of being though, it's something that's granted to people by the government to "promote the progress of science and useful arts". If copyright hinders things then I think it's reasonable that exceptions would be made.
Copyright laundering is an illusion.
If the LLM generates output that a court decides is sufficiently derivative, and especially (but not necessarily) if the LLM was trained on the source material being infringed, then whoever redistributes the derivative output is going to be liable for copyright infringement.
Creation of the LLM itself is transformative, but LLM output which infringes is not.
Is it true then that if someone stole an entire code base from a vibe coded app from a non permissively licensed project and that person claimed that it was derived from an LLM and was not stolen at all that the person who stole the code is not a thief because it came from the same place? Or are they a thief because someone else copyrighted it? How do vibe coders protect themselves not knowing who else has the same derivative code or who holds the copyright first? Or can't they?
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Do you think that human directing the agent owns copyright for any legal reason?
The case Community for Creative Non Violence Vs Reid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_for_Creative_Non-Vio...) solidifies a supreme court opinion that someone contracting a work and directing an author does not grant authorship to the commissioner of the work, it grants authorship to the person actually doing the work.
The author can grant authorship and copyright to the commissioner with a contract, but the monkey picture (and others) have solidified that only humans can be granted copyright. Since LLMs aren't human they can't hold copyright, and if the LLM doesn't have legal copyright then they don't have legal rights to assign copyright to you.
It depends on what level of creative control you had over the code.
Code is protected by copyright as a literary work. The method is not protected by copyright, that would be the domain of patents. What's protected are the words.
If you say "Claude, build me a website about X" then you do not have any creative control over the literary work Claude is producing. You just told a machine to write it for you. Nor, like a compiler, is it derivative of any other work that you wrote.
If, on the other hand, you are working jointly with Claude to make specific changes to the code on a line-by-line basis, then you will have no problem claiming copyright over the code. Claude in this case is acting as a tool, but there's still a human making decisions about the code.
In the case where you wrote a bunch of markdown and then told Claude to generate the corresponding code but didn't have any involvement in writing the code itself, you could perhaps claim that the code is a derivative work of the markdown, a court would have to handle that case-by-case basis and evaluate how much control you exerted over the work.
> only humans can be granted copyright.
No, a copyright application can be filed with a corporation listed as the author. Watch for the copyright notice at the end of the next major movie you see.
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Interesting, though, that ownership of the code can still be transferred to the employer. So it's in the public domain (because not human authored) but owned by the employer (because the human and/or LLM was employed by the employer)? I don't really understand how this works.
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but the ability for the agent to build it in the first place is based off of stolen IP.
I honestly don't understand why the attitude that underlies this is so prevalent.
When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.
The immediate retort to that is that the LLM is looking at code that wasn't its to read. But I don't think that's a valid objection. Pretty much by definition, everything I've learned from has a copyright on it, and other than my own code on my own time, that copyright is owned by someone else. Much of the code that's built up my understanding has been protected by NDA, or even defense-department classifications: it wasn't mine in any way. But it still informs how I do all my future coding.
By analogy: I'm also an artist, especially since my retirement. My approach to photography was influenced by Ansel Adams, and countless other artists whose works I've seen displayed in museums, or in publications and online. My current approach to painting was inspired by Bob Ross and others, and the teachers who have helped me develop. I've taken pieces of what I've seen in all their work, and all of that comes out in my photos and paintings, to varying degrees.
I've taken ideas from others in code and in art, and produced something (hopefully!) different by combining those bits with my own perspective. I don't think anyone has a claim on my product because of this relationship.
Likewise, I know that many of my successors have learned from my code (heck, I led teams, wrote one book about software development!). And I hope that someday my artwork has developed to the point where there's something in it that's worth someone else's attention to assimilate. I've never for a minute - even decades before the advent of LLMs - hoped or even imagined that my work would remain locked up with me, and that the ideas would follow me to the grave.
As they say, we are all standing on the shoulders of giants. None of us would be able to achieve the tiniest fraction of what we have, without assimilating what has come before us. Through many layers of inheritance it's constantly being incorporated in subsequent works.
In a few decades at best, I'll be dead. It probably won't be very long after that when people even forget my name. But the idea that something I've done - my work in developing software systems, or in my photography and painting - will continue to have ripples through time, inspires me and gives me hope that I'll have some tiny shred of immortality beyond my personal demise.
Humans should have more legal privileges than machines, just as individuals should have more legal privileges than corporations. It's really as simple as that. I don't want to gripe around making up justifications, that's how the law should be and if it turns out not to be that, I'm going to be nettled.
I live in the UK, and most US law is based upon English common law, it's not some immutable code given to us from above. It's based upon assumptions and capabilities of the entities participating in the system at the time the law was codified. It can and should change to make more sense if those assumptions and capabilities shift massively.
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In many of those examples, there is payment to the creator of the works that others are learning from. Authors are paid for their books, when we listen to music on the radio the musician is paid royalties, etc. When you lead a team and mentor junior engineers you're being paid for your time.
The nature of the source material matters though. Training a model on open source software seems perfectly fair - it has explicitly been released to the public, and learning from the code has never been a contested use.
IMO the questions around coding models should be seen as less about LLMs and more as a subset of the conversation about large companies driving immense profits from the work of volunteers on open-source projects, i.e. it's more about open source than AI.
Scale and the ability to generate a livelihood of your creations and/or the ability to control how what you have created is used, for instance, to demand attribution.
The attitude is derived from a general animus many have towards AI companies. They resent the efficacy of AI because it devalues individual expertise.
I can't imagine it really justifiable to say that training off data is the same as "stealing", when that same claim, that learned information that a person could retain and reproduce constitutes copyright infringement is the subject of many dystopian narratives, like this one, where once your brain is uploaded to the cloud you have to pay royalties based on every media product you remember.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFe9wiDfb0E
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You’re confusing yourself with a commercial product. You’re not a product that was created by other human beings based on someone else’s IP.
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For another human being to look at my open source code, learn from it, get inspired by it, appreciate what I did, and let it influence their own creativity would bring me joy. That's why I open sourced it in the first place.
Few people ever actually read open source code, but I'd like to think on the rare occasions they do, they share a connection with the author. I know when I read somebody else's code, for me to understand it I have to be thinking about the problem the same way they were when they wrote it. I feel empathy with them and can sometimes picture the struggle, backtracking, and eureka moments they went through to come up with their solution.
Somehow I don't get the same warm fuzzy feelings about a machine powered by investor money ingesting my work automatically, in milliseconds, and coldly compressing it down to a few nudges on a few weights out of trillions of parameters. All so the machine can produce outputs on-demand for lazy users who will never know of me or appreciate my little contribution, and ultimately for the financial benefit of some billionaires who see me as an obsolete waste of space.
I guess I'm just irrational that way.
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> When I write code, what I write and how I write it is informed by having read countless source code files over my education and my career. Just as I ingest all that experience to fine-tune how my later code is written, so does the LLM from the code it's seen.
You are presumably human. We have granted humans specific exemptions in copyright law. We have not granted that to LLMs. Why are we so eager to?
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I've created my own DSL, and instruct Claude Code how to generate code for this DSL using skills.
Since this is a new language, and not documented on the web nor on Github, Claude's ability is not based off of stolen IP. At best it's trained on other language concepts, just like we can train ourselves on code on GitHub.
Maybe a good reason to create a new programming language?
Interesting, but I still do not think this is as easy. The AI model is still trained on some existing works, and it is generating code in the new DSL or programming language still based some higher level ideas and expressions it has consumed during training. You have added just one more level of indirection. The output cannot anymore be verbatim copy of some existing work or non-short snippets, however, the output may still carry "expression" that are substantially similar to something pre-existing.
Note: IANAL. The above is just from my current understanding.
I wonder what OSS licenses would have looked like if we saw all of this coming.
The LLM is just a database. It's like saying 'I own the copyright to what comes out of an API because I crafted the query' or 'I own the copyright to the responses I get from the bots on the Starship Titanic because I crafted the message they respond to'.
I could possibly see an argument for the owner being whoever paid for the tokens used, but honestly I think the argument for that is weaker than what you're suggesting; I'm merely playing devil's advocate here.
I don't think there's even a valid argument for any other ownership model, or at least none that I can think of.
I see the argument for whoever paid for the tokens. Or in the case of a free AI usage, the person who sent the prompt (or whoever they are acting on behalf of, i.e. the company they are working for at the time).
The primary issue being that it's all built on stolen data in the first place.
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No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.
If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.
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That’s now how it works. The human using the tool (like claude code, etc) owns the copyright of the code generated.
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So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill.
The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.
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I agree with this sentiment, because the person directing the agent can still direct it in a way where it'll produce a better or worse output than another person directing it.
This interpretation makes sense. I think even the 'fair use' clause in the US doesn't protect LLMs. One argument I've heard often is that LLMs synthesize their training set to produce novel output in the same way as a human would... That may be the case, but legally an LLM isn't a human. You can't look at the output of an LLM and say that it's 'fair use' with respect to its training set; it hasn't been established that AI has the same 'fair use' right as a human does; it's already pushing it that companies have this right (let alone an AI agent); anyway, that's just one problem... Also, this is ignoring the fact that the researchers who compiled the training set COPIED the original copyrighted data in order to produce that training set. They either copied the entire work into the training set or they fed the entire work directly into the LLM; in either case; at some point, the entire work was copied verbatim into the LLM's input layer before it was ingested by the AI. The researchers copied the copyrighted content without permission.
Also, when it comes to code, the case is even more damning because the vast majority of the code which LLMs are trained on was not only copyright but subject to an MIT license (at best) and even the MIT license, which is the most permissive license in existence, still says clearly:
"Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software"
The word 'person' is used very intentionally here.
I think there should be several kinds of AI taxes which should be distributed to all copyright holders. There should be a tax to go to writers (and book authors), a tax to go to open source developers and a tax for the general population to distribute as UBI to account for small-form content like comments and photography...
People invested a lot of time building their entire careers around the assumption of copyright protection; so for it to be violated on such a scale would be a massive betrayal.
I find idea that the code could be copyrightable as weak. There are only so many ways to write a for loop. Similarly you can't copyright schematics (apart from exact visual representation as form of art). Code is just a schematic.
Note: IANAL
Copyrights already preclude short phrases for the same reason -- there are only so many ways in which short phrases could be produced. The moment a work becomes larger (large enough; AFAIK, the threshold is not precisely defined), the reasoning you applied fails to apply.
The Google-Oracle lawsuit did not decide whether APIs (when large in number) are copyrightable or not.
You can think that's how it should be. But that's not necessarily how it is. I'm reminded of the famous monkey selfie copyright dispute [1]. A photographer set up a camera and gave it to a monkey but after a legal dispute, courts decided nobody owned the copyright.
I can totally see this applying here as well.
Now this doesn't resolve the issue of AIs being trained on copyrighted works it had no rights to. The counterargument is that this is a derivative or transformative work but I don't believe that's settled law at all.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
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.
Best part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.
Well, eventually it'll probably be added to the Berne Convention agreement or some such.
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Depends on where they pay their taxes generally.
I love that genAI art will not be copyrightable and genAI code will be. The power of the Almighty Dollar at work.
The work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.
I have trouble believing that the DMCA claims would be found to be in bad faith when they were made at a time when the question of what degree of human input is required to acquire copyright on AI generate code hasn't been resolved at all.
It doesn't seem like bad faith to think that copyright is stronger than the courts end up thinking, just being mistaken.
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Work-for-hire doctrine doesnt automagically absolve you from IP law. Microsoft and Intel already learned this in the nineties when they paid San Francisco Canyon Company to steal Apple code.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company
LLMs are just code stealers, will gladly generate Carmacks inverse for you with original comments.
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I can't see how that can work.
As a developer, the fact that my source code passed through a compiler - an automated tool - doesn't give the author of the compiler any claim on my executable code.
As an artist, the fact that I used, e.g., Rebelle to paint a digital painting, or that I used Lightroom (including generative AI to fill, or other ML/AI tools to de-noise and sharpen my image) in editing a photograph, doesn't give EscapeMotion, Adobe, or Topaz, any claims to my product.
Why, then, would there be any chance that use of a tool like Claude - a tool that's super-advanced to be sure, but at the end of the day operates by way of a mathematical algorithms - would confer any claims to Anthropic?
If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable
Is figuring out the appropriate prompts to use in directing Clause qualitatively different than using a (much) higher-level abstraction in coding? That is, there was never any talk as we climbed the abstraction layer from machine code to assembly to Fortran or C to 4GLs to Rust etc., that the assembler/compiler/IDE builder would have any ownership claim on the produced executable. In what sense can Anthropic et al assert that their tool, which just transforms our directives to some lower-level representation, creates ownership of that lower-level representation?
It's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion.
Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely?
There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
The catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.
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They won't want to own code that is malicious\illegal\used in crime, although it's really weird to me that no one (in LEO) seems to care that, for example, grok generates CSAM, revenge porn, probably other illegal things, so they'll probably get to have their cake and eat it too.
Those things have precise legal definitions which it may not be entirely clear that an LLM can even generate them - especially in the USA where the 1st covers things that many would think illegal (and are illegal in other countries).
I'm not sure Anthropic would appreciate the liability that ownership would imply.
Too late to edit, but OpenAI certainly doesn't want ownership or liability, for the CSAM they've produced. They certainly don't want ownership/liability of code which does $ONLYAWFULTHING.
This is the same shape as the image cases.
Zarya of the Dawn already settled it for Midjourney output: human-written elements were protected, AI-generated images were not. The character design didn't get copyright even though the human picked, prompted, and curated. Code isn't different. Prompting Claude to produce a function is closer to prompting Midjourney to produce a frame than to writing the function yourself.
The reason it feels different to engineers is that we're used to thinking of the compiler as the analogy. But a compiler is deterministic — same input, same output. An LLM isn't. That's the line the Copyright Office is drawing, and image cases got there first.
AFIK: Even the slightest modification of the work is transformative and will produce copyrighted material.
It does not have to be substantial transformation.
Depends on the scale of LLM involvement, the copyright office left a pretty big carve out for things that are human sourced and then modified by LLM, or the reverse, LLM output thats modified by human intention. (They had to do this because there are already pseudo random elements to digital artwork, like say, render clouds and render noise, that might otherwise poison an artwork). In fact I dont think this has been tested with Highlight area > Prompt a change to this area of the image workflows.
They also mention in the same document that were LLMs to more closely approximate deterministic tools, they would be open to reevaluating. That is Requesting X gets X without substantial wiggle room.
I dont think that last part has been tested with an extremely large set of prompts and human generated input to create a more deterministic output. Even outside of code, where you see large prompts, creative writing LLM tools, NovelAI or Sudowrite for instance can have pages and pages of spec for the LLM, sometimes close to 50% of the size of the final output.
Then there's testing, review etc, human processes confirming that the output meets spec, updating it where needed intelligently.
There are also foreign courts, with similar rules about human intention, that have found in favor of prompts only, where it could be demonstrated that multiple rounds of prompts were used to refine the image.
I wouldnt call this settled at all tbh. And to be honest, a lot of this doesnt require exposure. you dont need to own up to LLM use in a lot of settings, proving LLM use is so difficult its easy to jump up the ladder from LLM (100%) to LLM (50%) and ultimately claim ownership.
The people who will get busted for this are basically just super lazy leaving ChatGPT responses in, failing to pay an editor, failing to modify images for anything more than layouts.
> But a compiler is deterministic — same input, same output. An LLM isn't.
Temperature 0 determinism is subject to active research. NVIDIA tried but failed so far, DeepSeek V4 seems to have done it. I hope judges won't be swayed by this an AI generated code will classified as uncopyrightable, just like Images are.
Fair point on temp-0. But I don't think determinism is what the courts will hang it on. A deterministic LLM still makes the expressive choices — naming, structure, control flow — that the human didn't make. The image cases didn't turn on whether you could re-roll the same Midjourney frame. They turned on who made the creative decisions. Same logic should hold for code.
But is there anything stopping a human from applying for copyright in their own name? Does the fact that somebody can recreate the prompt invalidate their claim?
What you're asking is, "could someone do fraud" and "would being found out invalidate their copyright". To both of which the answer is generally, yes.
It'd be a form of plagiarism, just with different consequences to the most common form.
Filing isn't the gate, registration is.
Copyright Office requires you to disclose AI involvement and disclaim the AI-generated parts. Zarya of the Dawn is the example — applicant filed for the whole graphic novel, got partial registration on the human-written text, refused on the Midjourney images. The reproducibility of the prompt isn't really the test. The test is whether a human made the expressive choices.
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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.
> 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.
Agree with your other points, but IMO this one has always been better. You often need to design the backend and frontend to work with each other, and that requires a lot more coordination when it's separate teams.
One of the few things I do kind of like about LLM-assisted coding is that it's helping to bring back "lone wolf" programming. We currently default to using massive teams to build massive software because of all the work involved, but teams have a huge communication/documentation cost, and a lot can leak and be lost the more communication has to happen to get things done. Code assistants cut down on the "all the work involved" part, and I think will help to bring one-man shops back into fashion.
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?
Also, it's supremely easy do the wrong abstractions long term and compromise premature internal designs that will start to starve of human mental modeling, hence explaining with accountability how things work and what the plans are when an incident happens. Also, if the wrong generalizations are introduced, coded correctly and reviewed and approved by AIs, then who's even driving really?
I rarely see #3 yield better solutions, it's usually better to collaborate as a team on requirements and gotchas, but let one person own implementation.
But both backend and front-end? Do everyone have to be full stack?
I opened my popcorn for the unholy trinity of HN x law x AI, your comment was one of my faves, love the purple prose. :)
The fourth point about code commenting is the one that connects directly to the ownership question. When developers write comments to explain intent, those comments are evidence of human creative direction. When Claude writes the code and the comments, and the developer merges without adding their own explanation of the architectural decisions, the record of human authorship disappears along with the institutional knowledge. The documentation problem and the copyright problem are the same problem.
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it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.
Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human creativity. Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity, so the balance is tilted in favor of AI generated copy not being copyrightable.
The Supreme Court or legislation could change this, and I'd guess there will be a movement to go in that direction, but till something like that succeeded it's not so.
> But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Trade secrets aren't very well protected, though.
You can sue the person who leaked/stole your secret, but if others keep sharing it once it is leaked you can do nothing to them.
> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity
I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion of bugs and "basic bitch" solutions, asking for more robust this and edge case that. It felt like I wrote a novel. How is that not creativity (Crayon-eater or Picasso, creativity is creativity)?
I wonder when my manager "prompts" me "I want the feature X and I want it fast", is his prompt a human creativity?
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) {
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
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.
You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.
Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)
Totally agreed.
I work in M&A. Nearly every lawyer, accountant, investor, and software business owner thinks their code is solely valuable and a trade secret. I find it hilarious and try to be as diplomatic as possible about why it's not. They also willfully will give their client list to a potential acquirer but get super cagey they moment a third party provider asks for their code to be scanned.
This argument easily gets shut down when I asked why, Twitch, a $1B business didn't crater to their competition when their full codebase was leaked.
You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.
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Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.
No.
It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.
So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid.
If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.
The open source licenses are intended as defenses against the people who would otherwise attempt to claim ownership of that code and apply a proprietary license to the code, i.e. exactly what now Anthropic and the like have done, together with their corporate customers.
Of course, if it is accepted that the code generated by an AI coding assistant is not copyrightable, then using it would not really be a violation of the original open source licenses. The problem is that even if this principle is the one accepted legally, at least for now, both Anthropic and their corporate customers appear to assume that they own the copyright for this code that should have been either non-copyrightable or governed by the original licenses of the code used for training.
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Nobody ever talks about convergence.
You, right now, are taking about convergence.
If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.
Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?
Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS
https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740
> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable
I think this is an unusual opinion.
Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.
If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?
And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?
I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.
Why were the HFT firms suing employees?
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.
>it should be pretty clear that if you provided the tool the specification for the code you want, you have already provided creative input.
If you provided a human contractor with the specifications for the code you want, the courts have repeatedly made clear you have not provided the creative input from a copyright perspective, and the contractor needs to explicitly assign those rights to you if want to own the copyright on the code.
Let's say we didn't have assemblers, but instead we would have three professions:
- Specifiers, who make the specification for the system
- Programmers, who write C code
- Machine encoders, that take that C code and write machine code for a CPU
Would it be that the copyright would then belong to programmers, if no other explicit assignments would be made?
---
Thinking about it, probably yes: copyright of the spec belongs to specifies, copyright of the C belong to programmers, and copyright of machine code to machine encoders. Or would it depend on the amount of optimizations the machine encoders would do, i.e. is it creative or not? And then does this relate to the task and copyrightability of C compiler output, where optimizations can sometimes surprise the developer?
LLMs aren’t human.
Specifications are not necessarily creative input. Eg if I write a prompt that just says “write a rate limiter in Python”, there’s really no creative input. I didn’t decide on the API, or the algorithm to bucket requests, or where to store counters, or etc. I just gave it statements of fact, which are inherently not creative.
Compilers are different in that the resulting binaries are not separately copyrighted. They are the same object to the Copyright Office because one produces the other, in the same way that converting an image to a PDF is still the same copyright.
LLMs don’t do that. The stuff coming in may not be copyrighted, and may not be copyrightable. The stuff that comes out is not a rote series of transformations, there are decisions being made. In common use, running a prompt 10 times might yield 10 meaningfully different results.
I’m dubious the outcome will be “any level of prompting is enough creativity”.
The trick is to constrain the LLM to program in a very defined coding style
If I make the LLM generate code that follows my own code architecture and style, that should be enough creative input
Fine then that's not copyrightable at all. Just like hello world isn't copyrightable, whether in source form or compiled form.
The compiler analogy is the right one to reach for and the Copyright Office addressed it directly: the question is not whether you provided input, it is whether the creative expression in the output reflects human authorship. With a traditional compiler, the programmer authors every expression in the source. With an LLM, the programmer authors the intent and the model makes the expressive decisions about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. Whether that distinction matters legally is what Allen v. Perlmutter is working through right now. The summary judgment briefing completed in early 2026 and it may be the next landmark ruling on exactly this question.
To me this is like asking who owns the binary files a compiler generates.
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I wrote an R library doing some simple regressions using the GPU, with Claude. I asked it to provide the same API as lm, glm and some other base R functions. It copied their code wholesale without mentioning it to me. So, now my library is GPL… which is not a big deal in this context, but it was quite a shock.
Three things matter when it comes to eating my breakfast sandwich:
1/ Was the pork in my sausage reared on a farm that meets agricultural standards?
2/ Was the food handled safely by the kitchen that cooked my food?
3/ Does the owner of the diner pay kitchen wages in accordance with labor law?
By contrast, I have no idea what went into the models I use, what system prompts have prejudiced it, and whose IP has been exploited in pursuit of my answer.
That’s being charitable, really. In practice the open secret of the AI industry is that the vast majority of training data, for want of a better word even if it is likely to be the most precise description, is stolen data.
Probably, yes, but the burden of proof is with us not them.
I'm already glad some companies have the guts to open their models because proving it for open models is probably a lot easier than for a model behind a service.
The proof is the $stupid-billion infrastructure built and kept up to host mousetraps armed with free cheese made of virtue signalling about doing the right thing and sharing the code with the world for free.
That's a matter of changing a law, it's all up to the people and their representatives. We talk as if everything is set on stone but if there really is a will, there is a way.
What's an example of data that might have been stolen?
The media industry loves to quote ridiculous numbers on lost revenue due to piracy etc. May be a rough ballpark numbers will get them to do something about this theft.
Can someone put a rough estimate on potential revenue loss (direct and incidental) from training AI with industry wise breakup.
It’s wrong to stop progress. I just want to know what data went into my model and have access to the same data. The same way we have national libraries of books but with the caveat that I don’t really know how one is supposed to browse petabytes of OpenAI .zips like I browse old books.
If the data is proprietary (eg Meta’s stash of FB comments) then I am satisfied to be told it’s private and I can’t see it. If, however, the works were public then give me a URL if it’s live or a cached copy if it isn’t.
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.
The article addresses this explicitly:
> Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection
Note the word "predominantly", and the discussion that follows in the article about what the courts and the copyright office said.
Skimming over the article, it's a lot about what the copyright office said and very little about what courts said. But the opinion of the copyright office doesn't have any legal force. Regulations passed by the copyright office would be binding, but their opinions are just opinions. We will have to wait until relevant court cases reach a conclusion. And so far running litigation isn't even about that question, it's about infringing the rights of works that are in the training data
No such assumption is made in the article.
Nor does it give a single answer.
Mere prompting is still not enough for copyright, and the problem is unsolved on how much contribution a human needs to make to the generated code.
In the case for generated images copyright has been assigned only to the human-modified parts.
Even worse, it will be slightly different in other nations.
The only one that accepts copyright for the unchanged output of a prompt is China.
Here's a question I have: if the AI generated image is of a character of which you own the IP, don't you have protections based on the character regardless of who gets copyright protections from authorship of the image?
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I'm sure it's not quite that simple. Only parts the parts of those knock-off works that aren't public domain could be copyrightable. If you only own the copyright to ten lines in a 10k line codebase, then it's probably fair use for someone else to just to take the whole thing.
Plus what if Anna Karenina was GPL?
Anna Karenina is public domain, assuming you’re talking about the original? If you translate it then maybe you could release it under GPL, but bit odd?
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You use humans to edit AI code? When you level up you are just using AI to write, AI to review, AI to edit, AI to test. Not a lot of steps left for meat bags.
You're forgetting that you need coffee/tea/mate to fuel the button pushers. The Jetsons predicted this decades ago.
AI for review is terrible, and by no fault of their own. It's our job to specify and document intention, domain and the right problems to solve, and that is just hard to do. No getting around it. That's job security for us meat bags.
AI to write - code is buggy and not what I asked for
AI to review - shallow minutia and bikeshedding
AI to edit - wrote duplicated functions that already existed
AI to test - special casing and disabling code to pass the narrow tests it wrote
AI report - "Everything looks good, ship it!"
Ok what about all the Anthropic’s engineers who say they don’t write code at all and it’s 100% AI-generated?
> This is of course assuming you take AI-generated code unchanged.
How much code do you need to change in order for it to be original? One line? 10%? More than 50%?
That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
> That's arbitrary and quite unproductive convo to be honest.
Yeah but that’s what the legal system ostensibly does. Splitting fine hairs over whether a derived work is “transformative” is something lawyers and judges have been arguing and deciding for centuries. Just because it’s hard to define a bright red line, doesn’t mean the decision is arbitrary. Courts will mull over whether a dotted quarter note on the fourth bar of a melody constitutes an independent work all day long. It seems absurd, but deciding blurry lines are what courts are built to handle.
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If you modify the work, that creates a derived work from whatever copyright the original works has, not a new work that is fully copyrightable.
As the article says in the Tl;DR at the top the code may be contaminated by open source licenses
> Agentic coding tools like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex generate code that may be uncopyrightable, owned by your employer, or contaminated by open source licenses you cannot see
> 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.
That's not how copyright works. The modified version is derivative. You can't just take the Linux kernel, make some changes, and slap a new license on it.
Wrong. This territory was heavily covered in music before this code concept - it has to be “transformative” in the eyes of the law. Even going in and cleaning up code or adding 10-25% new code won’t pass this threshold. Don't bother arguing with me on this, just accept reality and deal with it.
My copy of "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" is explicitly listed as being copyrighted by Ben H. Winters in 2009 despite the majority of the words being Austen's, though. Perhaps music has different rules compared to text. I suspect Winters and his publisher have investigated the legality of this more than either of us have.
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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.
Plus companies just violate GPL everywhere billions of times with impunity (see: every phone ever) and nothing happens to them.
> What to preserve: Commit messages that describe what you changed and why, not just what the AI generated. “Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch” is evidence. “Add rate limiting module” is not.
> The second commit message versus the first is the difference between a defensible authorship claim and a clean “Claude wrote this” record.
That makes no sense to me, as the commit message is probably LLM generated as well. (and even easier to generate as it doesn't have to compile or pass automated tests).
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?
A recipe isn't copyrightable but is still protected under trade secret law. I imagine that the same would apply. I think the major difference with software copyright is that I can just decompile your binary or copy a binary and give it to other people. For SAAS companies that don't distribute binaries, I imagine they basically have the same protections against rogue employees.
To look at it another way, just because some code I work on at my job is derived from open source MIT-licensed code doesn't mean I personally have the right to distribute it if my company doesn't want me to. I'd guess this comes under some generic "confidential information" clause in the employment contract.
Hmm your example is different: if you manually write code, there is a copyright for it whether it is derived from an MIT-licence or not. If you don't own that copyright (because your employer does), then you don't have the right to distribute it because it is not your code.
If you generate the same code with AI, now it does not have a copyright. If it depends on an MIT library, then the MIT library has a copyright and you have to honour the licence. But the code you produced does not have a copyright (because it was generated by an AI). And therefore nobody "owns" it. My question is: can your employer prevent you from distributing something they don't own?
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That is exactly the right question and the answer is genuinely strange. Uncopyrightable work falls into the public domain, which means anyone can use it, copy it, or build on it freely. The employer can still call it a trade secret and protect it through confidentiality obligations in employment contracts, but that protection is contractual rather than property-based. A trade secret loses protection the moment it is disclosed. So the employer's claim over purely AI-generated code is essentially: "you cannot share this" rather than "we own this." Those are meaningfully different legal positions, and most companies have not thought through which one they actually have.
Yes, and if the same come ends up in someone else's hands, they can state "we didn't steal it, a GenAI generated it for us, the same as it did for you". Given the non-deterministic operation of current GenAI systems (a major difference from compilers), it would probably be hard to prove either position.
So employees are not allowed to distribute the code, but if it leaks, then it is public and the company cannot do anything about it. Correct? That's what happened to Anthropic I think?
Presumably company policy would be implicated here, not copyright law. Whether or not it's copyrightable, what you create using AI is work product.
More interesting question is "Who wants to own it"...
The answer is probably "Nobody"!
Depending on the scale. If you ask Clause to one-shot an app from a nebulous description, you get a prototype which you would understandably loathe to own the code of. If you plan carefully and limit the scope, you get code that you understand, can approve of, and are okay owning further down the line.
I spent two and a half hours writing up a detailed outline for a small webapp. Claude popped it out in one shot 100% working., I added features after but the time you spend on a good outline saves hours later.
At what point is liability the only "job" left for humans?
I think it was tor.com that last year had a story where the newbie hired for the corporate HR dept ended up being the last human left after all others were replaced.
Ah, here we go, courtesy of google-ml: '"Human Resources" by Adrian Tchaikovsky, published on Reactor[...] https://reactormag.com/human-resources-adrian-tchaikovsky/ '
Presumably, every company that has non-LGPL CC code in production wants to own it...
"Own" as in "be responsible for". Nobody is too keen to own a pile of semi-working trash, and extensive vide-coding can produce such piles easily.
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This is a big question that makes my employer nervous about using LLM-generated code, along with the even-more-unresolved question "what happens if the LLM outputs an algorithm that is protected by patent?" (particularly worrying because we know the base training included patent descriptions.) Questionable copyright can often be worked around (particularly since we don't distribute source) but infringing on a patent can destroy a company.
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.
There’s so much FOMO right now around AI that no one is thinking clearly. I wouldn’t be so confident in your company.
I would bet you any amount of money that metas ownership over CC-generated code is never challenged or threatened
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To evaluate the legal risks of using AI generated code, let’s consider how many lawsuits there have been over these concerns.
Inadvertent copyleft license violations: probably 0 lawsuits
Competitor copied your software, you could not defend your rights in court because it was made with AI: probably also 0
Users of agentic AI for software development: >10 million
The thinking here seems pretty clear to me.
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Meta's confidence almost certainly rests on the employment contracts and IP assignment clauses, not on a legal theory that AI output is inherently copyrightable. The enterprise agreement with Anthropic assigns outputs to the licensee. The employment contract assigns work product to Meta. Those two documents together give Meta a defensible ownership position regardless of the authorship question. The interesting gap is for developers using personal accounts or consumer plans on side projects, where neither of those documents exists.
I don't understand how a company can have IP copyright rights on code that is inherently uncopyrightable (in the unlikely event scotus rules that way).
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The M&A angle is the one that's actually going to force clarity on this. Most companies using AI tooling haven't thought about it at all until a term sheet shows up with an IP rep they can't back up. That's when "who owns this" stops being a philosophy question.
Lawyers I have spoken to have stated strongly that they believe collective works doctrine will provide strong protections for most mature and sizable software. I see no mention of these considerations here.
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.
> Code from pirated text books
Anthropic "solved" this by intermingling the texts extracted from pirated books (illegal) with texts extracted from the physical books they bought and destroyed (legal), so no one can clearly say if the copyrighted material it spits out came from a legal source or not. Everyone rejoiced.
I've seen copyright notices that explicitly forbid use for AI training. Would this "transformation" argument still hold in such cases?
For example:
No Generative AI Training Use
For avoidance of doubt, Author reserves the rights, and grants no rights to, reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio including without limitation, technologies that are capable of generating works in the same style or genre as the Work, unless individual or entity obtains Author’s specific and express permission to do so. Nor does any individual or entity have the right to sublicense others to reproduce and/or otherwise use the Work in any manner for the purposes of training artificial intelligence or machine learning technologies to generate text, text to speech, voice, or audio without Author’s specific and express permission.
> books they bought and destroyed (legal)
They're only legal if training is fair use - and even I don't think it's immediately clear what would be the legal status of verbatim regurgitation of code in copyright, or code protected by patents?
AFAIK I (as a human developer) can't assume that I can go and copy code out of a text book, and then assume copyright and charge for a license to it?
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The intermingling argument is actually central to the Bartz settlement structure. The settlement required destruction of the pirated dataset specifically because commingled training data creates an unresolvable provenance problem. For deployers building on Claude, EDPB Opinion 28/2024 requires a documented assessment of the foundation model's training data legal basis before deployment. "We cannot tell which outputs came from which source" is not a satisfactory answer to a regulator running that assessment. wrote about it before here: https://legallayer.substack.com/p/i-read-every-edpb-document...
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 sound recording analogy breaks down at the point where the recorder makes no creative decisions. Pressing record captures what is already there. Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation. The closer analogy is hiring a session musician and telling them the key and tempo. You own the recording under work-for-hire if they signed the right contract, but the creative expression in the performance is theirs unless explicitly assigned. The button you push to start the model is not the same button as the one on the recorder.
> Prompting Claude generates something that did not exist, through decisions the model makes about structure, naming, pattern, and implementation.
LLMs don't make decisions. Their output is completely determined by an algorithm using the human prompt, fixed weights, and a random seed. No different than the many effects humans use in image or audio editors. Nobody ever questioned whether art made using only those effects on a blank canvas was subject to copyright.
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Fourier theory says that any sound, however complex, can be synthesized by summing sines and cosines. That's what an LLM does, if you twist the metaphor enough. It synthesizes complex outputs from simpler basis functions that are, or should be, uncopyrightable.
The fact that it inferred those basis functions from studying copyrighted works doesn't seem relevant. Nor does the fact that the "Fourier sums" sometimes coincide with larger fragments of works that are copyrighted. How weird would it be if that didn't happen?
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"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
This sounds like a problem that's pretty easy to get around.
CC does not need LGPL code. There's more than enough BSD and Apache code to go around.
And they can generate synthetic data that is better than LGPL for their training.
It's also a problem that does not seem feasible to meaningfully enforce.
It's easy to generate CC code and lie and say you didn't. It would be hard to prove that you did, especially if you took any precautions to make it even slightly difficult that you did.
Unlike GPL, BSD and Apache licenses do not claim to also cover your non-AI-generated code that only invokes the AI-generated code.
However, even if the BSD/Apache/MIT licensed code can be incorporated freely in your application, you still have no right to remove the copyright notices from it and/or to claim that you own the copyright for it.
Therefore, unless the AI model has been trained only on non-copyrighted public-domain code, incorporating the generated code in your application means that you have removed the copyright notices from it, which is not allowed by the original licenses.
There is absolutely no doubt that using an AI coding assistant works around the copyright laws, but it is still equivalent with doing copy and paste with fragments from copyrighted works into your source code.
I consider that copyright should not be applicable to program sources, at least not in its current form, so reusing parts from other programs should be fair use, but only if human programmers would be allowed to do the same.
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With sufficient obfuscation (which models seem to provide intrinsically), how would anyone know to sue? On top of that, only the most major sorts of litigation have the legal force to pierce even the flimsiest of obfuscation... this is likely all moot.
If some GPL-licensed group were to sue some commercial software project that they do not have the source code for, what would even give it away? But they throw $1 million at a lawyer who can at least get it to the discovery phase somehow, and the source code is provided. It looks to be shit, but maybe an expert witness would come along and say "that looks inspired by the open source project". Where does it go from there? The model is a black box, but maybe you've got a superhero lawyer who manages to rope in Anthropic or OpenAI, and you can see how it produced the code given those prompts. What now? Are there any expert witnesses who both could say and would say that it was "bulk copying-pasting code". And if it were, what jury is going to go for that theory of the crime? Copying-and-pasting, but the code doesn't match, except in short little strings that any code might match. This isn't a slamdunk, and it's not going to proceed very far unless it's another Google-vs-Oracle shitfest.
The chardet dispute is the closest thing to an active test case on this specific question, and you are right that it has not resolved into settled law. "Emerging legal consensus" was imprecise. The more accurate framing is: the legal community's working assumption, based on how copyright doctrine treats derivative works, is that training-data provenance travels with the output. That assumption has not been tested definitively in court yet.
thanks for this; it's definitely a fair point. I updated the piece to reflect this
Ownership is one question. IMO, a more interesting question is who is responsible when the code does some real-life damage.
Why should it be any different than it ever was? If a release manager checked it but didn’t catch the vulnerability, they have some culpability. If the developer shipped the code without checking it, they have some culpability too. Ultimately, if they both work under an organization that they report to, they’re responsible to that organization, which is, in turn, accountable to its customers (and investors perhaps.)
LLMs really change nothing about this.
No one. The usual.
> Code that Claude Code or Cursor generated and you accepted without meaningful modification may not be copyrightable by anyone.
Except if it happens to regurgitate a significant excerpt of some existing work, then the authors of that can assert their copyright; i.e. claim that it infringes.
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.
The meaningful human authorship question is the elephant, agreed, and the regulators have deliberately refused to quantify it for exactly the reason you describe any bright line number becomes a target to game rather than a standard to meet.
The logging point is sharper than it might appear. In a copyright dispute over AI-assisted code, interaction logs could cut both ways. A plaintiff trying to establish human authorship would want the logs to show substantial architectural redirection, multiple rejections of Claude output, and documented reasoning for structural decisions. A defendant challenging that authorship claim would subpoena the same logs to show verbatim acceptance of output without modification.
The practical implication i guess here,that the developers who want to preserve a copyright claim over AI-assisted code should treat their prompt history as a legal document from the start. It seems all over the world the logs are the evidence. Whether they help or hurt depends entirely on what they show.
The bit about treating one’s prompt history as a legal document has really struck a nerve with me. I’ve been keeping a separate git history solely for my prompts. Initially, the goals were simple: reuse prompts, turn some into skills, etc. But in light of the insights from the article and the discussions here, I need to treat this practice as serious business.
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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?
Normally this solved with an employment contract: "Anything you write, the copyright is transferred to your employer"
If you want to go much deeper, https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ is particularly good at least on the side of comprehensiveness.
Did Claude Code not start out as human input? Would it not be safe to say that a reasonable amount of it is still human input? But also, just because its mysteriously "not theirs" doesn't mean they magically have to give you the code.
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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Tangential but I find this an interesting parallel from a few years ago:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...
This is like asking:
"Who owns the text microsoft word helped you write?"
Claude code is a software tool not a legal entity.
Not if claude does the writing. MS doesn't write things for you, and if it did, you would not be entitled to a copyright in whatever it wrote for you.
Claude is not a legal entity, it is a software tool that outputs text based on statistics. There is a user that used a tool to create text and that user is the legal entity responsible for the text in any legal way that matters.
Anything else would be completely ridiculous given current laws in most countries.
It would be as ridiculous as blaming the car in a car accident where you drove over someone.
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Missed opportunity for a tongue twister:
Who coded the code Claude Code code?
i do, all of it. sorry
Good overview of the issues. I'm sure there are a few nits to pick with that.
But something that is overlooked is that the world is bigger than the US and it's an absolute zoo out there in terms of copyright laws in different countries. Anything you think you might understand about this topic goes out of the window if you have international customers or provide software services outside the US. Or are not actually based there to begin with. And there are treaties between countries to consider as well.
Courts tend to try to be consistent with previous rulings, interpretations, etc. When it comes to copyright, there are a few centuries of such rulings. The commonly held opinions among developers that aren't lawyers are that AI is somehow different. And of course since the law hasn't actually changed, the simple legal question then becomes "How?". And the answer to that seems to involve a lot of different notions.
For example, "AIs are not people, and therefore any content produced by them isn't covered by copyright to begin with" is one of the notions brought up in the article. A lawyer might have some legal nits to pick with that one but it seems to broadly be the common interpretation. So AI's don't violate copyright by doing what they do. In the same way you can't charge a Xerox machine with copyright infringements. Or Xerox. But you could go after a person using one.
And another notion is that any content distributed by a human can be infringing on somebody else's copyright and that party can try to argue their case in a court and ask for compensation. Note that that sentence doesn't involve the word AI in any way. How the infringing party creates/copies the content is actually irrelevant. Either it infringes or it doesn't. You could be using AI, a Tibetan Monk copying things by hand, trained monkeys hitting the keyboard randomly, a photo copier, or whatever. It does not really matter from a legal point of view. All that matters is that you somehow obtained a copy of an apparently copyrighted work. AI is just yet another way to create copies and not in any way special here.
There are of course lots of legal fine points to make to how models are trained, how training data is handled, etc. But if you break each of those down it boils down to "this large blob of random numbers doesn't really resemble the shape or form of some copyrighted thing" and "Anthropic used dodgy means to get their hands on copies of copyrighted work". I actually received a letter inviting me to claim some money back from them recently, like many other copyright holders.
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.
This is actually closer to how the Copyright Office thinks about it than the article makes clear. The registration guidance that emerged from the Thaler proceedings specifically asks applicants to describe the human creative contributions and how the AI was used. A documented workflow showing requirement, architectural decision, rejection of AI output, human restructuring, and review creates a paper trail that maps directly onto what the Office looks for. The can you show how it got here test you are describing is the practical version of the legal standard.
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?
This seems to be grounded in US law. Does anyone know if the same rules would apply in eg EU law?
Copyright law kind of transcends national borders by certain international treaties like the Berne Convention. Which is why the US copyright holders could enforce their "woulnd't steal a car" threats in Europe.
Most of this is based on Copyright legal framework, which is surprisingly homogeneous around the world. The discussions about ownership of AI-generated material are exactly the same in EU.
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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.
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.
It is copyrightable. A *human* can copyright code they wrote.
I meant in the sense that the "tool" is an LLM and the "work" was vibe coded.
If vibe coded work is not copyrightable, it cannot be reassigned to the employer and become copyright protected.
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How is it for human developers now if the company tool is a cloud tool and not running on company servers?
Well I don't own anything I write while working on my company. Maybe my company and Claude can fight over who owns it.
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.
It seems that author unironically advises to write your commit messages like this: "Restructured Claude’s module architecture, rejected initial state management approach, rewrote error handling from scratch", to have a chance at defense in potential court hearing. I find it funny, if vindicating for my personal approach. If the expectation is to "restructure, reject, rewrite" what "AI" spits out, why use "AI" at all at this point???
First answer who owns the model built with public data
The model ownership question and the output ownership question run on separate legal tracks and the piece focuses on the second deliberately. On the first: the model weights are owned by Anthropic under work-for-hire from their engineers regardless of what the training data contained. Training data copyright infringement is a separate tort claim against Anthropic, not a basis for anyone else to claim ownership of the model. The Bartz settlement resolved the pirated books claim without disturbing Anthropic's ownership of the weights. Owning the training data does not give you ownership of the model trained on it, any more than owning the paint gives you ownership of the painting.
I'm still flabbergasted that people – and big, visible companies with big targets on their backs – choose to keep on using the output of LLMs without having an answer to these questions.
And I'm worried that once that has been sufficiently normalized, laws and interpretations of them will adapt to whatever best suits those users. Which will mean copyrightwashing of FOSS. My only hope then is that surely if free software can be copyright-washed by the big guys, then so can the little guy copyright-wash the big guys' blockbuster movies or whatever, which might lead to some sort of reckoning.
The idea that the provenance of a given tool's code inherently pollutes the material it's used with seems kind of illogical. Wouldn't it follow from this premise that any code written using open source IDEs and debugged with open source debuggers and other tooling would itself then be considered copyleft? Are works written with LibreOffice not copyrightable?
There's obviously a huge issue with the legitimacy and ownership of training data being fed to LLMs. That seems like an issue between the owners of that IP and the people training the models and selling them as services more than the people using the tool. Isn't this just another flavor of SCO trying to extort money out of companies using Linux?
the entire US economy rides on AI. no ruling throwing a wrench into the multi trillion engine is ever going to be permitted to happen
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.
The original bargain you describe, limited term in exchange for public disclosure, is exactly what makes the current situation strange. If AI-generated output falls into the public domain immediately, that is actually closer to the original intent of copyright than 95-year terms. The legal question is whether that outcome happens by design or by accident, and what it means for the people building products on top of AI-generated codebases right now.
By design or by accident
It’ll happen by evolution. Just complex systems trending the way they trend.
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.
AI is a monster to our current copyright system - monster in the philosophical sense, that is, an example that destroys the concept.
First, its creation is (claimed to be) extremely useful for society, but in order to be created it requires ignoring copyright for pretty much everything ever written. Something we kinda shrugged under the table.
Then, it introduces an extreme jump down in creation effort - so if the focus is protection of effortful creation, nothing with AI use qualifies. But of course, you'd want society to benefit from effortlessness in general, spending more effort than needed in a task is the opposite of efficiency.
Whoever pays for the tokens.
What if no meaningful thought was put into the code (entirely vibe-coded slop), but it’s made for your employer? Shouldn’t the work be uncopyrightable?
I do. I used a tool to create it. I own the things I create.
Anything else is just bullshit equivocation.
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?
There is no such thing as ownership of a pattern of information. It has been an illusion, and that illusion is now fading.
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.
I have a wood cutting machine and some wood. Who owns the timber?
Sadly, IP "ownership" and copyright law are vastly more complex than ownership of physical stuff.
Or were you planning to reproduce the (say) Ford Motor Company's trademarked symbol in wood? If so, you're right back in the stinkin' swamp.
What is the wood in your example?
This is like a machine you ask for timber and you get timber but you didn’t need to provide any wood
yo Mama
-Claude
Could you please stop posting generated comments to HN? It's not allowed here, and it looks like you've done it over 30 times already.
(Of course, there's no way to be certain of this, but it's what our software thinks, and the overall pattern is pretty convincing.)
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079
On that matter, wouldn't an AI flag for submissions help hn? I wouldn't flag a submission for LLM style as it is too harsh, but I don't want to read them -- if only because I don't like LLM prose.
There are so many submissions where most of the discussion is about whether the content has any human effort behind, or the LLM was just a purely assistive role like translating. It's really devaluing hn, IMO. Not sure how much an AI flag would help, or introduce new issues, given how difficult the problem is, though.
Curious: how do you exactly detect an AI-generated comment?
A case when security through obscurity is perfectly justified.
You are definitely right to flag it, apologize for that. I used an AI assistant for the replies, and I will make sure not to use one going forward.
Why do you use an AI assistant for the replies?
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This too is a generated post
Appreciated!
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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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How do you exactly read that article in that way?
50(1) states that AI systems which interact directly with public must inform that they are interacting with AI system.
50(2) states that AI generated synthetic audio, image, video or text content must be marked as such. However this requirement applies to "providers" of AI systems. And according Article 1(3) that is:
> ‘provider’ means a natural or legal person, public authority, agency or other body that develops an AI system or a general-purpose AI model or that has an AI system or a general-purpose AI model developed and places it on the market or puts the AI system into service under its own name or trademark, whether for payment or free of charge;
So it sounds like it would apply to e.g. Anthropic via Claude Code, not to users of Claude Code.
It's also unclear if this would apply to the compiled output or not.
No one really cares about EU law. Even the EU itself if it's inconvenient. Hell half their government website still don't comply with GDPR (probably almost all if you don't conveniently ignore the USA shield act).
They'll fine some USA companies and we'll end up with another cookie banner at the start of every piece of software and some random hacker news user will claim that's absolutely not what the law wants or needs but everyone will settle on it even the website's of bureaucracy that made the law.
Is code content though? This would seem more applicable to video where people are being deceived by AI content masking as real. Rather than internal application code.
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