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Comment by KallDrexx | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Note: IANAL

I think what this means is that the employee may not be the copyright owner for multiple reasons, which are possibly applicable simultaneously. It does not imply that the employer owns copyright over the work that is in public domain, which would be a contradiction.

yeah, that makes sense

Under at least EU AI Act, any work done by AI is not granted copyright. But it does not mean copyright does not apply, it means the amount of work credited to AI is set at 0% (simplification). A human working off another's work unless it's perfect copy will have "credit" for changes that are judged creative/transformative, meaning a human plagiarizing something still can claim to have some degree of authorship. An AI won't.

In a sense, the copyright status of final work is a sort of "sum with dilution" were each work involved adds to claims, but AI's output is set at 0 - the prompt or further rework by human is not.

As for employer, details vary but generally "work for hire" rules and contracts do reassignment of material rights (in EU and some other places you can not reassign moral rights which are a different thing).

When you write code by hand, you are the author. As part of your contract with your employer you grant copyright and authorship to your employer by default (as stated in the contract).

The LLM is not employed by you or your employer, because you can't enter contracts with non human or non human organizations.

When you license a non-LLM code generation service (like a page that creates a website for you), that company owns the copyright of the generated website because their deterministic system generated code by defined rules and mechanisms that were defined by the code generation system. Assuming no LLM as part of that, there is no code that is generated by the system outside of the rules that they defined (it's not filling in the blanks that you or the code generation system didn't explicitly define).

Since they own the copyright of the website, they can then assign the copyright and authorship to you because of your license agreement to them.

Since the LLM is filling in the blanks on its own in undefined ways, it is the author and not Anthropic/OpenAI/ETC. That means that even though you have a license agreement with Anthropic/OpenAI/etc.. to transfer copyright, they didn't have copyright/authorship, the LLM did. And since the LLM can't legally own copyright/authorship (since it isn't a human) then it can't grant it to you and you can't then grant it to your employer.

yeah this is what I understand - that it's the copyright ownership that is being transferred. But if there's no copyright to transfer, what does the company end up owning?

Afaict the company doesn't own any of what was written by an LLM. In theory that means all the companies are opening themselves up to code being reused by third party and a lack of legal protection.

In reality I fear it's going to cause less copyright protections even for small developers.

> 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.

However, until very recently the creative product must have been created by someone so there is an implicitly created copyright over the product in the first place. With AI output, that might not continue to be true, we don't really know how it'll work out yet.

In any case, the corporation did not create the product, people created it and their contractual relationship with the corporation defined how the ownership of that work was managed. So, I don't find it too unusual that this element of personhood is available to corporations.

This isn't what the copyright means.

The employees and contractors are the authors, and because of the contract they sign they assign copyright to the corporation. Corporations, as a collection of humans are allowed to have authorship.

LLMs are not companies and they are not humans in any way shape or form, and thus cannot get copyright nor grant copyright to a third party.

Under US copyright law, copyright protection subsists "in original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression":

<https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102>.

It's not that corporations can't hold copyright. But a corporation cannot mechanically create "original works of authorship" by a purely mechanical process. That process is limited to human authors. "Works for hire" would be a common case of a human creator (author) resulting in a corporate assignment (ownership), see: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work_for_hire>.

Notably cases:

- The "monkey selfie" copyright case, in which photographer David Slater arranged for monkeys to take selfies. Copyright ownership denied by both the US Copyright Office (against Slater's claim) and (in a separate case arguing the monkey should hold copyright) by an appellate court: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...>, Naruto v. Slater, No. 16‑CV‑00063 (N.D. Cal. 2016).

- Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Simple compilations are not copyrightable regardless of whether created by humans.

- THALER v. PERLMUTTER (2023). "[T]his case presents only the question of whether a work generated autonomously by a computer system is eligible for copyright. In the absence of any human involvement in the creation of the work, the clear and straightforward answer is the one given by the Register: No." <https://caselaw.findlaw.com/court/us-dis-crt-dis-col/1149169...>.

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