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Comment by plq | Hacker News Reader

I don't get this. No I did not write that code but I paid money to eg. Anthropic to buy that code. To me it sounds like I own it just the same.

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Ownership is not the same as authorship. Copyright is about authors rights, not owners.

If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract. I can only sell you usage rights - which may or may not be exclusive. If the text I wrote is trivial, neither you nor me can limit when it is reproduced. The effort of collecting data is not sufficient, if the data itself is declared trivial. See rulings about phone books.

When an AI provider produces data that is deemed not copyrightable, it cannot legally sell you exclusive usage rights. It can give it to you exclusively, but since you cannot yourself claim copyright, the moment you publish it it becomes available for others to use as well. One may argue that an LLM is similar to a phone book, with its entries being “trivial“ and its composition not artistic enough.

At least that’s the line of argument.

Ownership is not the same as authorship. Copyright is about authors rights, not owners.

If you buy a text of me, I cannot sign away my authorship, and there’s certain limitations on what you can do with my text regardless of contract.

(This is correct in many jurisdictions but not in all; for example moral rights are not a thing everywhere.)

"I paid money to someone to write that code" is exactly the line of argument that would lead to no copyright. There was the famous monkey selfie court case in 2015 that ruled that at least in the US, monkeys can't hold copyright. The same arguments would apply to AI. And since the AI can't create copyrighted works on its own, it can't assign copyright for works it created for hire either

The other line of argument is the "Claude Code is to coding like a photo camera is to painting". The image is generated automatically, but the input in how you point the camera is enough to still make it a creative work protected by copyright. Under that interpretation, you are not hiring AI, you are using it like a tool

The US Copyright Office holds the former opinion. I'm sure once this goes to court, lots of companies will vehemently argue the latter. I would not be surprised if we even end up changing the law over this

>"I paid money to someone to write that code" is exactly the line of argument that would lead to no copyright.

That's news to me. I (along with many hundreds of others) was paid to develop Minecraft, candy crush and battlefield, yet last I checked, they all retain their copyright.

Because you are human, and can thus create copyrighted works, and can assign that copyright when you do work for hire. Monkeys and AIs can't create copyrighted works, so there is nothing to assign when doing it for hire

The other line of argument avoids that issue by arguing that you personally created the code with the help of a tool (like a compiler or camera), not just commissioned it

Sure, but that's not what GP stated at all, unless possibly if they're anthropomorphizing to the point that they refer to Claude as "someone".

GP's (or rather GGGP's) statement was "I did not write that code but I paid money". So they claim no authorship. Anthropic is a company, they can't be the author either. So the only one left as author in that reasoning is Claude.

I don't think that necessarily anthropomorphizes it. We speak of monkeys as authors without calling them human. And really the legally important fact is that there was no human author. You can also treat it like CCTV footage which is generally not under copyright because there is no human author (even though most would hesitate to call the camera the author either)

As a human, it is possible for you to create copyrightable works and transfer the copyright to Microsoft in exchange for money. It is not possible for Claude Code to do those things because Claude Code is not a human.

Yes, but Claude code is hardly a "someone", so that's not what the comment I replied to was arguing at all.

They retain ownership over that code because you signed a contract saying explicitly that. Did you sign the same thing with Anthropic? Did your company?

Anthropic isn't a party to such contract either because they (most likely, in the reasonable reading of relevant laws) hold no copyright over the output of their LLM.

In this case, it's more like you paid money to FablePool. FablePool used Claude as a tool, and it delivers the product so they are the owners of the code, and have the MIT copyright assigned to them.

Nope. Copyright simply doesn't work like that. Unless there's real human creativity involved in the process, they can't just claim copyright to LLM output.

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