5 ms·

No, that human owns the copyright on the prompt, not on the work product.

kridsdale1 6mo ago
So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill. The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
  - Aerroon 6mo ago
    He's making a point about responsibility/liability. If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output. Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.
      - Aerroon 6mo ago
        The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ >The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output. If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
        teddyh 6mo ago
        If you hold an illegal party on public land, you would still be liable, even though you did not own the land.
        jacquesm 6mo ago
        In some places simply not keeping the public street in front of property ice-free can incur liability, even when you are not actually there when it snows. There are so many such examples I'm kind of surprised to see this kind of confused argument made here.
        Aerroon 6mo ago
        But that's not at all a comparable situation though, because it is your party. It doesn't matter where it is, we assign "ownership" of the party to you. Even the language we use explicitly states that. In the case of copyright, we explicitly states (by the copyright office), that you are not the author of an AI generated work. Same point goes to if an animal takes a picture.
        jacquesm 6mo ago
        > If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it? If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief. Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the content of that book, regardless of whether or not I hold the copyright to it. Conversely, if the original author sues because they feel their work infringes then that too is a liability that stems from the distribution. And 'distribution' is a pretty wide term, not unlike 'interstate commerce', lots of things that you might not consider to be distribution can be classified as such in court. Different laws do not come in packages, they apply individually, and sometimes they apply collectively but it isn't a menu where you can pick the combination that you think makes the most sense.
        Aerroon 6mo ago
    - generic92034 6mo ago
      That is not how responsibility works anywhere. If you are stealing a gun and murder someone with that gun, you are still responsible, even if it is not your gun.
keithba 6mo ago
That’s now how it works. The human using the tool (like claude code, etc) owns the copyright of the code generated.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  No, you are wrong about this. See: https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-output-can-be-protected-by-copyright-under-certain-circumstances/ https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-out... If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs. The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally accepted as not to create a new work (after all, anybody else inputting the same prompt would have a reasonable expectation of generating the same output modulo some noise due to versioning and possibly other local context). Claud code and in general AI generated code does not at present create a new work. But the prompt, that part which you input may be sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection.
  - keithba 6mo ago
    In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code). Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always) editing the code afterwards, manually running the code and promoting for changes, etc. Until the courts, legislators, or the copyright office define something otherwise, I’m highly confident of my assertion. (Mostly because of the insane number of hours I’ve spent with counsel on this. And, as a disclaimer, since I am biased: I worked on Copilot and Google’s various AI assisted coding products as an SVP and VP.)
    - jacquesm 6mo ago
      If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off. The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you make them out to be. Until there is a ruling that clearly establishes that the person that generated the prompt owns the copyright on the code I think it is misleading to suggest that this is already the case, your lawyers are not the lawyers of the parties that will end up hurt if it ends up not being so. For contrast: we have a very clear idea on what things are copyrighted and in general these things do not rest on a foundation of IP appropriated from others outside of the license terms. The fact that the infringement is fine grained and effectively harms the rights of 1000s or more individuals doesn't change the heart of the matter, whoever wrote the code: it wasn't you. Given your bias I'm not surprised that this would be your argument though, effectively you have created a copyright laundromat using code that you were nominally the steward of and not the owner but whether it stands long term or not is not up to your lawyers.
alok-g 6mo ago
If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.
- jacquesm 6mo ago
  Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another, the kind of thing that has been ruled copyrightable since copyright exists. The same goes for translations from one human language into another, and anybody with knowledge of more than one language will be happy to acknowledge that translating is hard work. Even so, the translator does not hold copyright on the result, at best they can say they have created a derived work and it is the original author that continues to hold copyright. Compilation and translation happen in a generic manner and does not rely on a mountain of other IP, it is really just a transformative tool that happens to do something useful, someone constructed it to be a very precise translation to the point that any mistakes in it are called bugs and we fix them to ensure the process stays deterministic. Translators try hard to 'get it right' too: to affect the intentions of the original author as little as possible. When you use a model loaded up with noise or that you have trained exclusively on code that you actually wrote I think a strong case could be made that you own the copyright on that work product. But when you train that model on other people's work, especially without their consent or use a model that has been trained in that way you lose your right to call the output of that model yours. You did not write it, and the transformative process requires terabytes of other people's IP and only a little bit by you. As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case.
  - alok-g 6mo ago
    +1 Adding two subtle points: >> Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another ... does not rely on a mountain of other IP ... and, the license agreement of the compiler and libraries used / linked to practically always explicitly waive copyrights over the said non-mountain of IP. >> As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case. ... a much stronger case that you have a partial copyright over the work, which is now likely a derivative work. You still may not have a case that you own the copyright exclusively (or as the original article says, that your employer does).

So I’m responsible for pushing the giant boulder at the top of the hill. The humans at the bottom who were crushed should blame the boulder, which happened to be moving.

jacquesm 6mo ago
I'm not sure what point you are trying to make.
- Aerroon 6mo ago
  He's making a point about responsibility/liability. If you only get copyright for the prompt you make, but not the output, then it's like being responsible only for the prompt, but not the output. Ie he's only responsible for pushing the boulder up the hill. The fact that it rolled down from the hill and crushed someone's house "isn't his fault" (he doesn't get copyright on it).
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    Well, you are responsible for the consequences. Liability is simply a different thing than copyright.
    - Aerroon 6mo ago
      The copyright office says that you don't get copyright because you're not considered the author: https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ https://www.copyright.gov/ai/ >The Office concludes that, given current generally available technology, prompts alone do not provide sufficient human control to make users of an AI system the authors of the output. Prompts essentially function as instructions that convey unprotectible ideas. While highly detailed prompts could contain the user’s desired expressive elements, at present they do not control how the AI system processes them in generating the output. If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it?
      - teddyh 6mo ago
        If you hold an illegal party on public land, you would still be liable, even though you did not own the land.
        jacquesm 6mo ago
        In some places simply not keeping the public street in front of property ice-free can incur liability, even when you are not actually there when it snows. There are so many such examples I'm kind of surprised to see this kind of confused argument made here.
        Aerroon 6mo ago
        But that's not at all a comparable situation though, because it is your party. It doesn't matter where it is, we assign "ownership" of the party to you. Even the language we use explicitly states that. In the case of copyright, we explicitly states (by the copyright office), that you are not the author of an AI generated work. Same point goes to if an animal takes a picture.
      - jacquesm 6mo ago
        > If you're not the author then why would you have to be liable for it? If you do not understand this make sure that you always operate within a framework of people who do because this soft of misunderstanding can cause you a world of grief. Because you are the person shipping it, and as such regular liability applies. If I'm not the author of a book, and make a lot of copies and distribute those I'm liable for the content of that book, regardless of whether or not I hold the copyright to it. Conversely, if the original author sues because they feel their work infringes then that too is a liability that stems from the distribution. And 'distribution' is a pretty wide term, not unlike 'interstate commerce', lots of things that you might not consider to be distribution can be classified as such in court. Different laws do not come in packages, they apply individually, and sometimes they apply collectively but it isn't a menu where you can pick the combination that you think makes the most sense.
        Aerroon 6mo ago
  - generic92034 6mo ago
    That is not how responsibility works anywhere. If you are stealing a gun and murder someone with that gun, you are still responsible, even if it is not your gun.

keithba 6mo ago

That’s now how it works. The human using the tool (like claude code, etc) owns the copyright of the code generated.

jacquesm 6mo ago
No, you are wrong about this. See: https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-output-can-be-protected-by-copyright-under-certain-circumstances/ https://technophilosoph.com/en/2025/02/07/ai-prompts-and-out... If you have a more recent citation referring to case law that states the opposite then that would be great but afaik this article reflects the current state of affairs. The human using the tool creates a prompt, there is then an automatic transformation of the prompt into code. Such automatic transformation is generally accepted as not to create a new work (after all, anybody else inputting the same prompt would have a reasonable expectation of generating the same output modulo some noise due to versioning and possibly other local context). Claud code and in general AI generated code does not at present create a new work. But the prompt, that part which you input may be sufficiently creative to warrant copyright protection.
- keithba 6mo ago
  In the US, the copyright office (as the article you link to says), has declined to define “meaningful” contribution. If you want to argue that the user doesn’t own it for incredibly trivial prompts, I won’t argue (though I consider that to be non-useful code). Every developer I’ve seen use these tools has have engaged in a meaningful contribution: specific directions across multiple prompts, often (though not always) editing the code afterwards, manually running the code and promoting for changes, etc. Until the courts, legislators, or the copyright office define something otherwise, I’m highly confident of my assertion. (Mostly because of the insane number of hours I’ve spent with counsel on this. And, as a disclaimer, since I am biased: I worked on Copilot and Google’s various AI assisted coding products as an SVP and VP.)
  - jacquesm 6mo ago
    If my business depended on a legal fiction to be true and I had invested a whole pile of effort + money into it being so then I would argue at every opportunity that 'of course it is legal'. But that's just a version of fake-it-until-you-make-it and in practice not all of those bets pay off. The fact that meaningful contribution has not been defined is a strong signal that things are not nearly as clear cut as you make them out to be. Until there is a ruling that clearly establishes that the person that generated the prompt owns the copyright on the code I think it is misleading to suggest that this is already the case, your lawyers are not the lawyers of the parties that will end up hurt if it ends up not being so. For contrast: we have a very clear idea on what things are copyrighted and in general these things do not rest on a foundation of IP appropriated from others outside of the license terms. The fact that the infringement is fine grained and effectively harms the rights of 1000s or more individuals doesn't change the heart of the matter, whoever wrote the code: it wasn't you. Given your bias I'm not surprised that this would be your argument though, effectively you have created a copyright laundromat using code that you were nominally the steward of and not the owner but whether it stands long term or not is not up to your lawyers.

alok-g 6mo ago

If that were true, a developer may own copyright over the source code, but nothing on the compiled binaries, and I could download practically all software available as compiled binaries and use for free.

jacquesm 6mo ago
Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another, the kind of thing that has been ruled copyrightable since copyright exists. The same goes for translations from one human language into another, and anybody with knowledge of more than one language will be happy to acknowledge that translating is hard work. Even so, the translator does not hold copyright on the result, at best they can say they have created a derived work and it is the original author that continues to hold copyright. Compilation and translation happen in a generic manner and does not rely on a mountain of other IP, it is really just a transformative tool that happens to do something useful, someone constructed it to be a very precise translation to the point that any mistakes in it are called bugs and we fix them to ensure the process stays deterministic. Translators try hard to 'get it right' too: to affect the intentions of the original author as little as possible. When you use a model loaded up with noise or that you have trained exclusively on code that you actually wrote I think a strong case could be made that you own the copyright on that work product. But when you train that model on other people's work, especially without their consent or use a model that has been trained in that way you lose your right to call the output of that model yours. You did not write it, and the transformative process requires terabytes of other people's IP and only a little bit by you. As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case.
- alok-g 6mo ago
  +1 Adding two subtle points: >> Indeed a developer owns copyright over the source code and on the compiled binaries, because there is no expansion happening here but just a translation from one format into another ... does not rely on a mountain of other IP ... and, the license agreement of the compiler and libraries used / linked to practically always explicitly waive copyrights over the said non-mountain of IP. >> As soon as you can prove that your contribution substantially outweighs the amount of IP contributed in total you would have a much stronger case. ... a much stronger case that you have a partial copyright over the work, which is now likely a derivative work. You still may not have a case that you own the copyright exclusively (or as the original article says, that your employer does).