Comment by zarzavat
13 hours ago
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.
I don't think case law totally supports the idea that working on a line by line basis means you have "no problem claiming copyright".
There problem is the LLM is still making assumptions on that line of code and thus it's still the main author (based on existing case law and the copyright office's opinion currently).
The markdown case is definitely more like the case I cited where the supreme court decided that specficiations and back and forth do not mean it's a deritive work and thus the actual implementor is the author, not the spec writer.