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I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge
by jugg1es 5mo ago
I want this question to have an interesting answer, but everyone knows that if this question ever goes to the courts, ownership will go to the people in charge with the money. The idea that Anthropic may not own Claude Code just because Claude wrote it is wishful thinking.
- embedding-shape 5mo agoBest part is, it's likely to have a different answer in every country, who knows what'll happen, not every country implicitly sides with the ones with the most money.
- adrianN 5mo agoDepends on where they pay their taxes generally.
- MarsIronPI 5mo agoWell, eventually it'll probably be added to the Berne Convention agreement or some such.
- LawnGnome 5mo agoThat's my feeling on the endgame too, but it'll probably be a decade before we get anywhere near it.
- conartist6 5mo agoIt's not wishful thinking, and ownership isn't a foregone conclusion. Sure the courts could mint a communist society with a few weird decisions about property rights, but this being the US do you really suppose that's likely? There's really no legal question of any kind that models aren't people and therefore cannot own property (and also cannot enter into legal contract as would be required to reassign the intellectual property they don't and can't own)
- wongarsu 5mo agoThe catch-22 is that the fact that models aren't people is only relevant if you treat them similar to a person. Like the US Copyright Office's opinion which treats it similar to a freelancer. If you treat the LLM as a machine similar to a camera, with the author expressing their existing intent through the tools of this machine, ownership is back on the table and more or less how it was before LLMs.
- conartist6 5mo agoWell if the camera in addition to choosing autoexposure also decided how to frame the shots, which lens to use, where to stand, and everything else salient to the artistry of photography -- all without direct human intervention, then I would think the situation would again be analogous. If the camera could do all that because an intern was holding it, the intern would still own the shots even if their employer gave them the assignment. That's why the intern signs an employment contract that reassigns their rights to their employer!!
- senaevren 5mo agoThe work-for-hire doctrine actually supports your intuition more than the AI authorship question does. The reason Anthropic likely owns Claude Code has little to do with whether Claude wrote it and everything to do with the employment contracts of the engineers who directed it. The DMCA takedown question is genuinely interesting though because DMCA requires the claimant to assert copyright ownership in good faith. If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable, the 8,000 takedowns could be challenged as bad faith DMCA claims. That is a different and more tractable legal question than the ownership one.
- rasz 5mo agoWork-for-hire doctrine doesnt automagically absolve you from IP law. Microsoft and Intel already learned this in the nineties when they paid San Francisco Canyon Company to steal Apple code. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Canyon_Company LLMs are just code stealers, will gladly generate Carmacks inverse for you with original comments.
- senaevren 5mo agoThe San Francisco Canyon case is a good example of exactly the right distinction. Work-for-hire determines who owns the output, but if the process of creating that output involved copying protected material, the infringement claim runs separately. The piece makes this point on the open source contamination section: owning the output and having a clean chain of title to the output are different questions. You can own AI-generated code and still have a copyleft problem in it.
- gpm 5mo agoI have trouble believing that the DMCA claims would be found to be in bad faith when they were made at a time when the question of what degree of human input is required to acquire copyright on AI generate code hasn't been resolved at all. It doesn't seem like bad faith to think that copyright is stronger than the courts end up thinking, just being mistaken.
- beej71 5mo agoI love that genAI art will not be copyrightable and genAI code will be. The power of the Almighty Dollar at work.
- helterskelter 5mo agoI'm not sure Anthropic would appreciate the liability that ownership would imply.
- helterskelter 5mo agoToo late to edit, but OpenAI certainly doesn't want ownership or liability, for the CSAM they've produced. They certainly don't want ownership/liability of code which does $ONLYAWFULTHING.
- dfxm12 5mo agoThey won't want to own code that is malicious\illegal\used in crime, although it's really weird to me that no one (in LEO) seems to care that, for example, grok generates CSAM, revenge porn, probably other illegal things, so they'll probably get to have their cake and eat it too.
- bombcar 5mo agoThose things have precise legal definitions which it may not be entirely clear that an LLM can even generate them - especially in the USA where the 1st covers things that many would think illegal (and are illegal in other countries).