4 ms·

You have copyright to a commit authored by you. You (almost certainly) don't have copyright (nobody has) to a commit authored by Claude.

• _heimdall 7mo ago
  Anthropic could at least make a compelling case for the copyright. It becomes legally challenging with regards to ownership if I ever use work equipment for a personal project. If it later takes off they could very well try to claim ownership in its entirety simply because I ran a test once (yes, there's a while silicon valley season for it). I don't know if they'd win, but Anthropic absolutely would be able to claim the creation of that code was done on their hardware. Obviously we aren't employees of theirs, though we are customers that very likely never read what we agreed to in a signup flow.
  • windexh8er 7mo ago
    I think all you need to do is claim that your girlfriend is your laptop. /s
  • CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
    Using work equipment for a personal project only matters because you signed a contract giving all of your IP to your employer for anything you did with (or sometimes without) your employer's equipment. Anthropic's user agreement does not have a similar agreement.
    • _heimdall 7mo ago
      My point was that they could make a compelling case though, not that they would win. I don't know of ant precedent where the code was literally generated on someone else's system. Its an open question whether that implies any legal right to the work and I could pretty easily see a court accepting the case.
      • CobrastanJorji 7mo ago
        Who owns the copyright for something not written by anybody, you ask? Is it the man who pays to have it written, or the owner of the machine that does the writing? But it is neither. Nobody owns the copyright because nobody has written it.
• graemep 7mo ago
  Where is there any legal precedent for that? In some jurisdictions (e.g. the UK) the law is already clear that you own the copyright. In the US it is almost certain that you will be the author. The reports of cases saying otherwise I have been misreported - the courts found the AI could not own the copyright.
  • Sharlin 7mo ago
    It's beyond obvious that a LLM cannot have copyright, any more than a cat or a rock can. The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. As far as I can see, it depends on the extent of the user's creative effort in controlling the LLM's output.
    • computerex 7mo ago
      According to the law, if I use Claude to generate something, I hold the copyright granted Claude didn’t verbatim copy another project.
      • emkoemko 7mo ago
        why wouldn't antroipic own it? they generated it?
    • graemep 7mo ago
      It may be obvious to you, but it has lead to at least one protracted court case in the US: Thaler v. Perlmutter. > The question is whether anyone has or if whatever content generated by a LLM simply does not constitute a work and is thus outside the entire copyright law. Its is going to vary with copyright law. In the UK the question of computer generated works is addressed by copyright law and the answer is "the author shall be taken to be the person by whom the arrangements necessary for the creation of the work are undertaken" Its also not a simple case of LLM generated vs human authored. How much work did the human do? What creative input was there? How detailed were the prompts? In jurisdictions where there are doubts about the question, I think code is a tricky one. If the argument that prompts are just instructions to generate code, therefore the code is not covered by copyright, then you could also argue that code is instructions to a compiler to generate code and the resulting binary is not covered by copyright.