Comment by shagie

Specifically in the area of copyright, there's a significant distinction between UK and US law.

The UK works under the "sweat of the brow" doctrine for copyright. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

    Under a "sweat of the brow" doctrine, the creator of a work, even if it is completely unoriginal, is entitled to have that effort and expense protected; no one else may use such a work without permission, but must instead recreate the work by independent research or effort. The classic example is a telephone directory. In a "sweat of the brow" jurisdiction, such a directory may not be copied, but instead a competitor must independently collect the information to issue a competing directory. The same rule generally applies to databases and lists of facts.

In the US, it is a minimal threshold of human originality and Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Ru.... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

The inclusion of "human" is important there. https://copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-auth... - the human authorship is mentioned several times.

    306 The Human Authorship Requirement

    The U.S. Copyright Office will register an original work of authorship, provided that the work was created by a human being. The copyright law only protects “the fruits of intellectual labor” that “are founded in the creative powers of the mind.” Trade-Mark Cases, 100 U.S. 82, 94 (1879). Because copyright law is limited to “original intellectual conceptions of the author,” the Office will refuse to register a claim if it determines that a human being did not create the work. Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co. v. Sarony, 111 U.S. 53, 58 (1884). For representative examples of works that do not satisfy this requirement, see Section 313.2 below.

    313.2 Works That Lack Human Authorship

    As discussed in Section 306, the Copyright Act protects “original works of authorship.” 17 U.S.C. § 102(a) (emphasis added). To qualify as a work of “authorship” a work must be created by a human being. See Burrow-Giles Lithographic Co., 111 U.S. at 58. Works that do not satisfy this requirement are not copyrightable.

    ...

    Similarly, the Office will not register works produced by a machine or mere mechanical process that operates randomly or automatically without any creative input or intervention from a human author. The crucial question is “whether the ‘work’ is basically one of human authorship, with the computer [or other device] merely being an assisting instrument, or whether the traditional elements of authorship in the work (literary, artistic, or musical expression or elements of selection, arrangement, etc.) were actually conceived and executed not by man but by a machine.”

The question is, does Claude Code fall into that category of authorship without creative input or intervention from a human author?

The prompts may be copyrightable... but the output if you don't go in and fix it up and provide that minimal amount of human originality to it? That appears to still be an open question of law in the United States.