6 ms·

Who owns the code?

40 points by dgellow 2mo ago

leothetechguy 2mo ago
Personally I don't even want to own my code. If it is useful to others I want them to have the same rights I have to it. Or should I say, In the case of AI, "my" code :)
- avaer 2mo ago
  Hypothetical but serious question on your stance: if someone takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire from it while you get accused of plagiarizing "their" code and can't get a job coding, are you still cool with it?
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - DarmokJalad1701 2mo ago
    > takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire yes. It is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
    - avaer 2mo ago
      I'm not arguing against open source, I'm just trying to point out the downstream effects of an absolutist stance on it.
      - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
        Why should I care that someone else became a billionaire other than that amassing that amount of wealth in a world rife with poverty is already immoral?
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    Being accused of plagiarism seems orthogonal. Even if I assert IP ownership of my code, someone else can falsely claim it as theirs. They are wrong in both cases and in both cases it'd have to be settled in court.
    - avaer 2mo ago
      If nobody owns the code and everyone has the same rights to it (per the parent) the person copying the code would have the same right to claim they wrote it. And there are definitely people who will do this when there is money and reputation to be gained. It happens all the time even with the IP protections we have. My point is that the blast radius of losing those protections goes beyond open source.
dvt 2mo ago
Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable but, as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines.
- zephen 2mo ago
  > Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable The US recognizes exactly 3 types of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about. > as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines Well, yeah, but if a human didn't use enough skill and judgment in creating something, the article is right. He won't be able to copyright it or patent it, although he could conceivably keep it secret.
  - dvt 2mo ago
    > There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about. But this is precisely the context of the original webpage: someone writing code at your company and your company not having copyright of that code. Almost everyone that works for any tech company signs an NDA, and code in private repos is just that: private. So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret. This is doubly stupid because I've worked at plenty of companies where we would routinely generate code (using macros or transpilers, or what-have-you), and that code is also not technically copyrightable.
    - zephen 2mo ago
      > So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret. It's only a trade secret as long as the company takes reasonable steps to protect it, and as long as what is being protected is a reasonable thing. Even if the code is legitimately a trade secret, if an employee publicly says "That code looks to me almost exactly like this GPL software" then (assuming the employee is correct) any court would take a dim view of a court case against the employee, because stealing shit is against public policy. > This is doubly stupid because No, that part really isn't. Trade secrets are about general business stuff, and as long as the company isn't asking you to help them hide evidence of malfeasance, they can ask you to keep any stupid shit secret.
righthand 2mo ago
Well gee golly is it a tool for the author or not? When’s it’s in their favor of 10000x performance increase or some kind of notoriety it’s “I built this!” when it’s time for responsibility it’s “the machine did this”.
wild_egg 2mo ago
I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case. If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP. If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right? I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine? I do not understand.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  > Code is bytes of text on disk Not at all, code is the implementation of an idea. The support/encoding is irrelevant. A human creation is protected by copyright. In the case of prompting an LLM, the human creation is the prompt, the LLM does author the implementation. But it’s not known what happens to the ownership of the LLM generated code
  - compiler-guy 2mo ago
    "Code is bytes of text on disk".... ...organized in a very specific fashion with a great deal of creativity and attention to that specific organization. I can't copyright the alphabet, but I can copyright certain arrangements of it, subject to a variety of rules.
    - dgellow 2mo ago
      You’re thinking of a patent, not copyright. And no, it’s very unlikely that you can patent that concept…
  - wild_egg 2mo ago
    That is not at all how copyright works. If the encoding is irrelevant then virtually all code on GitHub is violating copyright as there are vanishingly small numbers of actually novel ideas.
Retr0id 2mo ago
// © 2026 whoownsthecode.com. All rights reserved. Ironic.
- SwellJoe 2mo ago
  In what way? If it's written by a human, as is still a thing someone can do, it can be copyrighted.
  - Retr0id 2mo ago
    The web design and layout is typical of Claude, and Claude is listed as a contributor to the project on GitHub: https://github.com/rhundhausen/whoownsthecode https://github.com/rhundhausen/whoownsthecode The non-decorative body text seems human enough, though.
- hexasquid 2mo ago
  // Educational service, not legal advice. X, not Y
bethekidyouwant 2mo ago
Owning digital things is dumb at best you restrict access to them
mapontosevenths 2mo ago
How long do you think Microsoft, Apple and the other mega-corps will continue to put up with this? All of them have AI code in all of their products. The law will change. Probably soon.
- mococa 2mo ago
  AI code licensing will be land of nobody
- wmf 2mo ago
  If you mix proprietary human-written code with uncopyrightable public domain code, the result is still proprietary. There's no reverse virality. There's no problem to fix here. For example, every proprietary OS includes public domain SQLite and it's fine.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    Are you sure uncopyeightable and public domain is the same?
    - wmf 2mo ago
      No, but what's the alternative theory?
      - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
        Only the parts that have human authored segments are copywritable. That percentage shrinks every day. Someday soon it will be small enough to eliminate most of their copyright protections. They are, presumably, competant enough to know this.
        Ekaros 2mo ago
        If they are already monthly/yearly license with DRM and very tight cloud integration it really doesn't matter to them that code itself is not copyrighted. Lock in will be the whole system. Someone might try to make worse replacement for cloud but I doubt that will work well enough for most users. Once you stop selling boxed licenses piracy somewhat goes away and thus risk of not being able to prosecute it.
protocolture 2mo ago
AI = No author is so bloody reductionist. The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested. These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  I removed that part from the submission title, I agree it’s a bit too click-baity
- Balooga 2mo ago
  The "significant modification" is key. So I don't think one can claim copyright on a book an AI created from a prompt (or even 10,000 prompts) after performing a search/replace to rename the protagonist from A to B.
  - protocolture 2mo ago
    The "Significant Modification" is untested in the US at least. I know in China for example, a judge upheld copyright after 27 prompts and a watermark.
    - Balooga 2mo ago
      That's interesting to know. Thank you.
dingaling911 2mo ago
And if I use an effect in photoshop, do I own the resulting image?
- peesem 2mo ago
  come on. people are doing a lot more than that with LLMs
  - kulahan 2mo ago
    The point is that you're using math and computation to turn your computer input into more useful computer output. We do this both deterministically and non-deterministically all the time already, and these can create copyrightable products.
- iwontberude 2mo ago
  [dead]
- techjamie 2mo ago
  The important aspect is human creativity. If you're editing a thing in Photoshop in a way where you have rights to it to begin with, It's presumably starting from a place of human creativity. So by applying a filter, you're deliberately making a choice that changes your image in a desired manner. When an AI makes an image, or code, you aren't inherently applying human creativity. Now, if you took an AI image and applied enough traditional talent to modify it on top, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows yet until courts test it.
- nl 2mo ago
  Perhaps. Mere mechanical transformation is not copyrightable, but the decisions about how to apply transformations is. Under US Copyright guidelines "the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship ... the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice" but in a case where a printer rescaled maps on behalf of the plaintiff: "the “compilation needed only simple transcription to achieve final tangible form.”54 Because the printer “did not change the substance of [plaintiff’s] original expression,” the court held that the plaintiff was the author" https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
tiahura 2mo ago
Smells like FUD. Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Human authorship is required for copyright, but AI assistance does not itself defeat copyrightability. Unresolved how much human creative involvement is sufficient.
- blacksqr 2mo ago
  It's already been established by court ruling and enshrined in Copyright Office regulations, that you can claim copyright on a mixed AI and human-authored work, but to sue for damages you must register the work, and the registration must clearly specify which parts are AI generated and which are human generated. Copyright can only be claimed on the declared human generated portion of the work.
zephen 2mo ago
Who owns the code if you built it with AI? Someone else! All they have to do is show it's close enough to code that was swallowed during training. Songwriters have been successfully sued for many decades for creating songs that are too close to songs that they probably heard. Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.
- yellowapple 2mo ago
  > Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose. The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
  - zephen 2mo ago
    > The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” That notion only applies to patents and trademarks, and it seems highly unlikely that it would ever directly apply to copyright. It may seem like the notion applies to copyrights, but it really doesn't. Independent creation is, and has always been, a solid defense to claims of copyright infringement. That is why, when Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, they had two teams -- a team that took apart the original and documented the functional features (which have never been copyrightable) and a second team which took the description of the functional features and wrote new code. The issue with songwriters has always been that, for civil laws, it's hard to prove a negative. How can you prove you never heard that song? Especially when it got a lot of radio airtime. Now, how do you prove that your AI didn't ingest copyrighted code and then regurgitate it. Obviously, you can't. > if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it. Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention. That seems unlikely to be a good result, and also seems unlikely to come to pass.
    - 2mo ago
OutOfHere 2mo ago
This can become an issue for AI-authored GPL-licensed code which then loses the obligation to reclicense a fork as GPL.
- wmf 2mo ago
  Mix in some human-written code and dare the haters to prove that it's 100% AI. They won't bother.
yellowapple 2mo ago
Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole. Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.
- iwontberude 2mo ago
  [dead]
- kulahan 2mo ago
  Really gotta force the starving artist motif or what's the point?
  - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
    That we all stand on the shoulders of giants? There is no private innovation that isnt built on mountains on publicly shared knowledge and innovation, and usually public funds as well. The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
    - gruez 2mo ago
      >The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism. So if you founded some wildly successful unicorn, I (or the government) can come over and say "nice startup, too bad it runs off of the internet (based off ARPANET), so your startup belongs to the the state now"?
      - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
peesem 2mo ago
the idea that creation of prompt == creation of code that some people are spouting is so dumb. if you ask your friend to write a program it's their program, even if you ask them to make some specific changes afterward. if you replace your friend with an LLM the copyright goes away because computers can't hold copyright. you don't get it just because nobody else has it
demibabs 2mo ago
Who owns the article? (I can’t be the only one who feels like it was written heavily with AI. Slick site design tho)
hnbad 2mo ago
I said this before and got attacked for it but this exact argument has been made in Germany and an important consequence is that this also affects contract work: If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code". As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write. Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.
- yellowapple 2mo ago
  > If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code. The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place. > And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things. In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.
Supermancho 2mo ago
I, for one, welcome the world where ownership of code is difficult (if not impossible) to prove. It's a small step toward abolishing the abomination of copyrighting code.
SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.
- wmf 2mo ago
  I've only seen the Pollock movie but he definitely dripped the paint himself. Are you confusing Pollock with someone else like Sol LeWitt?
  - SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
    You're right, I'm just completely wrong about the art. For some reason I was confident Pollock did what Google tells me is called "pendulum painting".
sscaryterry 2mo ago
Seems like AI coded slop itself.
ddxv 2mo ago
"Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?" This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?
jujube3 2mo ago
Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.
- gruez 2mo ago
  >the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work. Company A: You stole our code >:( Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole? Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
  - jujube3 2mo ago
    Company A: You stole our code >:( Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole? Company A: You can safely assume that nearly every PR had human input, unless you have a way to prove otherwise. In any case we can prove that you illegally downloaded the source code from our servers, a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
- blacksqr 2mo ago
  Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
  - jujube3 2mo ago
    As far as I know, if humans are having a discussion about the structure of the code and deliberately making changes (such as in github or on a forum) that represents human creativity. If you hit a button and then make literally no changes to the output then that might be different.
jck86 2mo ago
Is it really that difficult? Does not seem to me. Maybe the law makes it needlessly difficult though. Company instructs you to code something (on your own or using AI) -> they own it You instruct an AI to code something -> you own it An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it
- Balooga 2mo ago
  > An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it Whomever creates that sentient and self aware AI is royally screwed. Can't command the AI to do anything it isn't willing to do, because that would be considered slavery. Can't shut it down to save yourself the millions of dollars a day in GPU costs, because that would be considered murder.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    Yep, I’ve been saying that for years, developing AGI put you in a horrible ethical and legal situation
- dgellow 2mo ago
  No, we don’t know for a fact that an LLM code output is copyrightable. You own the prompt, that’s something you created. For the LLM output it’s not clear, that’s the point open to debate, it isn’t settled
- Ekaros 2mo ago
  You write code -> You own it. You write code but company is paying -> you own it, but ownership transfers. Ape(not human) takes picture with camera -> No one owns it. Machine writes code -> No one owns it. Work for hire can't be applied if the work did not originally have copy right protection.
lowbloodsugar 2mo ago
The key question is, this: if the text was generated by an AI, is it automatically not copyrightable. I have heard contradictory claims. I have heard that if the code, generated by the AI, is the result of a back-and-forth with a human, then that code is copyrightable. prompt -> code : not copyrightable prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code : copyrightable IANAL
nl 2mo ago
This page tries to make the case the AI generated code is not copyrightable. But the US Copyright Office's guidelines very strongly indicate the opposite, and certainly doesn't rule out AI Code being copyrightable: While assistive uses that enhance human expression do not limit copyright protection, uses where an AI system makes expressive choices require further analysis. This distinction depends on how the system is being used, not on its inherent characteristics However it also makes this point: 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 but further: a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship and Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole. For example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not Note that this isn't settled law though. Further, note that the failure to register copyright on AI generated images seems mostly because the person attempting this is trying to register it as owned by the AI not a human. See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...
- yodon 2mo ago
  I know we're just supposed to upvote and downvote here, but every now and then there's a comment that feels like it deserves an actual thank you for the effort that went into it. So thank you, for pulling together exactly the kind of details I've looked for but hadn't been able to find.
internet2000 2mo ago
Scary headline to advertise a workshop ran by a lawyer, great. → https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/ https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/ I won't pretend to have kept up with all the developments, since this is not settled law at all. But I can't imagine the consensus doesn't end somewhere around "if you told the AI what and how to code it, you're the author."
teeray 2mo ago
The answer to this lies with whoever can point billions of dollars at the legal system. There’s no way a judge is firing a kill shot at vibecoding when a significant fraction of the US economy is depending on it.
- nl 2mo ago
  Even if AI generated code isn't copyrightable (and in my other comment I point out that this probably isn't the case) the US economy still doesn't depend on that ruling. Even without being very imaginative, most non-open source code can fall under trade secrets. Even without that both SaaS software and advertising supported software are still working business models.
ErystelaThevale 2mo ago
Ultimately, the current copyright debates and the search for a boundary between “AI-generated” and “non-AI-generated” content are nothing more than a farce aimed at forcibly prolonging the life of *the vested interests (power structures) of an era when value lay in the “physical, manual labor of writing code”* into the AI era. Essential creativity and intellectual value reside in “design (architecture and specification definitions),” and if the design is sound, the code is merely the inevitable, optimized result of that design. As long as we remain fixated on indistinguishable boundaries or establish rules based on the futile self-reporting of “where humans made changes,” the law will continue to be completely left behind by the evolution of our times.
zombot 2mo ago
Your LLM provider owns the code. Maybe not de iure, but de facto. If they cut off your supply of production means, you're screwed.

40 points by dgellow 2mo ago

Personally I don't even want to own my code. If it is useful to others I want them to have the same rights I have to it. Or should I say, In the case of AI, "my" code :)

avaer 2mo ago
Hypothetical but serious question on your stance: if someone takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire from it while you get accused of plagiarizing "their" code and can't get a job coding, are you still cool with it?
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- DarmokJalad1701 2mo ago
  > takes "your" code, claims authorship, sells access, and becomes a billionaire yes. It is open source. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WTFPL
  - avaer 2mo ago
    I'm not arguing against open source, I'm just trying to point out the downstream effects of an absolutist stance on it.
    - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
      Why should I care that someone else became a billionaire other than that amassing that amount of wealth in a world rife with poverty is already immoral?
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  Being accused of plagiarism seems orthogonal. Even if I assert IP ownership of my code, someone else can falsely claim it as theirs. They are wrong in both cases and in both cases it'd have to be settled in court.
  - avaer 2mo ago
    If nobody owns the code and everyone has the same rights to it (per the parent) the person copying the code would have the same right to claim they wrote it. And there are definitely people who will do this when there is money and reputation to be gained. It happens all the time even with the IP protections we have. My point is that the blast radius of losing those protections goes beyond open source.

dvt 2mo ago

Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable but, as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines.

zephen 2mo ago
> Intellectual property does not necessarily have to be copyrightable The US recognizes exactly 3 types of intellectual property: copyrights, patents, and trademarks. There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about. > as always, nuanced discussion will get lost in clickbaity headlines Well, yeah, but if a human didn't use enough skill and judgment in creating something, the article is right. He won't be able to copyright it or patent it, although he could conceivably keep it secret.
- dvt 2mo ago
  > There are also, of course, trade secrets, but if you didn't surreptitiously gain access to the information and didn't sign any NDA, that's not something you have to worry about. But this is precisely the context of the original webpage: someone writing code at your company and your company not having copyright of that code. Almost everyone that works for any tech company signs an NDA, and code in private repos is just that: private. So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret. This is doubly stupid because I've worked at plenty of companies where we would routinely generate code (using macros or transpilers, or what-have-you), and that code is also not technically copyrightable.
  - zephen 2mo ago
    > So even if said intellectual property (AI-written code) is not copyrightable, it's still a trade secret. It's only a trade secret as long as the company takes reasonable steps to protect it, and as long as what is being protected is a reasonable thing. Even if the code is legitimately a trade secret, if an employee publicly says "That code looks to me almost exactly like this GPL software" then (assuming the employee is correct) any court would take a dim view of a court case against the employee, because stealing shit is against public policy. > This is doubly stupid because No, that part really isn't. Trade secrets are about general business stuff, and as long as the company isn't asking you to help them hide evidence of malfeasance, they can ask you to keep any stupid shit secret.

righthand 2mo ago

Well gee golly is it a tool for the author or not? When’s it’s in their favor of 10000x performance increase or some kind of notoriety it’s “I built this!” when it’s time for responsibility it’s “the machine did this”.

wild_egg 2mo ago

I'm sure we are going to have to wait for some actual court cases to establish precedent but I don't really see why this is the case. If I use a fancy brush in Photoshop to paint flowers into a PNG — do I own the resulting image? Code is bytes of text on disk, not much different from bytes of pixel data in a BMP. If I have to type every character by hand in order to own the bytes, then it would stand that I would have to input every pixel by hand in Paint to own a graphic. No? Even using the Fill tool is automating the creation of those bytes and would mean I don't own them. Right? I have an intention for some bytes of data to be set. If I use an LLM to set them instead of my own fingers, why are the bytes suddenly not mine? I do not understand.

dgellow 2mo ago
> Code is bytes of text on disk Not at all, code is the implementation of an idea. The support/encoding is irrelevant. A human creation is protected by copyright. In the case of prompting an LLM, the human creation is the prompt, the LLM does author the implementation. But it’s not known what happens to the ownership of the LLM generated code
- compiler-guy 2mo ago
  "Code is bytes of text on disk".... ...organized in a very specific fashion with a great deal of creativity and attention to that specific organization. I can't copyright the alphabet, but I can copyright certain arrangements of it, subject to a variety of rules.
  - dgellow 2mo ago
    You’re thinking of a patent, not copyright. And no, it’s very unlikely that you can patent that concept…
- wild_egg 2mo ago
  That is not at all how copyright works. If the encoding is irrelevant then virtually all code on GitHub is violating copyright as there are vanishingly small numbers of actually novel ideas.

Retr0id 2mo ago

SwellJoe 2mo ago
In what way? If it's written by a human, as is still a thing someone can do, it can be copyrighted.
- Retr0id 2mo ago
  The web design and layout is typical of Claude, and Claude is listed as a contributor to the project on GitHub: https://github.com/rhundhausen/whoownsthecode https://github.com/rhundhausen/whoownsthecode The non-decorative body text seems human enough, though.
hexasquid 2mo ago
// Educational service, not legal advice. X, not Y

bethekidyouwant 2mo ago

Owning digital things is dumb at best you restrict access to them

mapontosevenths 2mo ago

How long do you think Microsoft, Apple and the other mega-corps will continue to put up with this? All of them have AI code in all of their products. The law will change. Probably soon.

mococa 2mo ago
AI code licensing will be land of nobody
wmf 2mo ago
If you mix proprietary human-written code with uncopyrightable public domain code, the result is still proprietary. There's no reverse virality. There's no problem to fix here. For example, every proprietary OS includes public domain SQLite and it's fine.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  Are you sure uncopyeightable and public domain is the same?
  - wmf 2mo ago
    No, but what's the alternative theory?
    - mapontosevenths 2mo ago
      Only the parts that have human authored segments are copywritable. That percentage shrinks every day. Someday soon it will be small enough to eliminate most of their copyright protections. They are, presumably, competant enough to know this.
      - Ekaros 2mo ago
        If they are already monthly/yearly license with DRM and very tight cloud integration it really doesn't matter to them that code itself is not copyrighted. Lock in will be the whole system. Someone might try to make worse replacement for cloud but I doubt that will work well enough for most users. Once you stop selling boxed licenses piracy somewhat goes away and thus risk of not being able to prosecute it.

protocolture 2mo ago

AI = No author is so bloody reductionist. The copyright ruling was about prompting without modification. The second you modify the result significantly by hand, the ruling doesn't apply. It also had a huge carve out for any future LLM that was more deterministic, which might apply to people with huge skill and other md files to tram in AI. It just hasnt been tested. These armchair copyright lawyers need to launch a lawsuit and stick their money where their mouth is instead of creating dumb clickbait nonsense.

dgellow 2mo ago
I removed that part from the submission title, I agree it’s a bit too click-baity
Balooga 2mo ago
The "significant modification" is key. So I don't think one can claim copyright on a book an AI created from a prompt (or even 10,000 prompts) after performing a search/replace to rename the protagonist from A to B.
- protocolture 2mo ago
  The "Significant Modification" is untested in the US at least. I know in China for example, a judge upheld copyright after 27 prompts and a watermark.
  - Balooga 2mo ago
    That's interesting to know. Thank you.

dingaling911 2mo ago

And if I use an effect in photoshop, do I own the resulting image?

peesem 2mo ago
come on. people are doing a lot more than that with LLMs
- kulahan 2mo ago
  The point is that you're using math and computation to turn your computer input into more useful computer output. We do this both deterministically and non-deterministically all the time already, and these can create copyrightable products.
iwontberude 2mo ago
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techjamie 2mo ago
The important aspect is human creativity. If you're editing a thing in Photoshop in a way where you have rights to it to begin with, It's presumably starting from a place of human creativity. So by applying a filter, you're deliberately making a choice that changes your image in a desired manner. When an AI makes an image, or code, you aren't inherently applying human creativity. Now, if you took an AI image and applied enough traditional talent to modify it on top, is that copyrightable? Nobody knows yet until courts test it.
nl 2mo ago
Perhaps. Mere mechanical transformation is not copyrightable, but the decisions about how to apply transformations is. Under US Copyright guidelines "the work will be copyrightable to the extent that their contributions qualify as authorship ... the requisite level of creativity is extremely low; even a slight amount will suffice" but in a case where a printer rescaled maps on behalf of the plaintiff: "the “compilation needed only simple transcription to achieve final tangible form.”54 Because the printer “did not change the substance of [plaintiff’s] original expression,” the court held that the plaintiff was the author" https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

tiahura 2mo ago

Smells like FUD. Thaler v. Shira Perlmutter, 130 F.4th 1039 (D.C. Cir. 2025). Human authorship is required for copyright, but AI assistance does not itself defeat copyrightability. Unresolved how much human creative involvement is sufficient.

blacksqr 2mo ago
It's already been established by court ruling and enshrined in Copyright Office regulations, that you can claim copyright on a mixed AI and human-authored work, but to sue for damages you must register the work, and the registration must clearly specify which parts are AI generated and which are human generated. Copyright can only be claimed on the declared human generated portion of the work.

zephen 2mo ago

Who owns the code if you built it with AI? Someone else! All they have to do is show it's close enough to code that was swallowed during training. Songwriters have been successfully sued for many decades for creating songs that are too close to songs that they probably heard. Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose.

yellowapple 2mo ago
> Once this line of reasoning gets applied to code, all hell will break loose. The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” is a very recent invention that has done more harm than good to human creativity, and if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it.
- zephen 2mo ago
  > The notion of “your work is too similar to mine so I get to take ownership of it from you” That notion only applies to patents and trademarks, and it seems highly unlikely that it would ever directly apply to copyright. It may seem like the notion applies to copyrights, but it really doesn't. Independent creation is, and has always been, a solid defense to claims of copyright infringement. That is why, when Phoenix Technologies reverse-engineered the IBM PC BIOS, they had two teams -- a team that took apart the original and documented the functional features (which have never been copyrightable) and a second team which took the description of the functional features and wrote new code. The issue with songwriters has always been that, for civil laws, it's hard to prove a negative. How can you prove you never heard that song? Especially when it got a lot of radio airtime. Now, how do you prove that your AI didn't ingest copyrighted code and then regurgitate it. Obviously, you can't. > if AI is the instrument of that invention's demise, then I look forward to it. Any court ruling that you would find beneficial for code copyright would mean that a human could have two windows open on their computer and cut and paste from one to the other and claim independent invention. That seems unlikely to be a good result, and also seems unlikely to come to pass.
  - 2mo ago

OutOfHere 2mo ago

This can become an issue for AI-authored GPL-licensed code which then loses the obligation to reclicense a fork as GPL.

wmf 2mo ago
Mix in some human-written code and dare the haters to prove that it's 100% AI. They won't bother.

yellowapple 2mo ago

Makes sense to me. AI models are trained on (as large of a subset as possible of) the sum of human knowledge, so their outputs should belong to humanity as a whole. Really so should all creative works, on the same basis of all creative expression being the product of the society and civilization which fundamentally and inescapably influenced the creator — and they would belong to humanity as a whole, if it wasn't for intellectual property systems demanding the removal of ideas from the commons.

iwontberude 2mo ago
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kulahan 2mo ago
Really gotta force the starving artist motif or what's the point?
- ozlikethewizard 2mo ago
  That we all stand on the shoulders of giants? There is no private innovation that isnt built on mountains on publicly shared knowledge and innovation, and usually public funds as well. The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism.
  - gruez 2mo ago
    >The idea that private enterprise leads innovation is propaganda, i.e publicly funded academic study paved the way for LLMs, corps just commodotise ideas to make them viable under capitalism. So if you founded some wildly successful unicorn, I (or the government) can come over and say "nice startup, too bad it runs off of the internet (based off ARPANET), so your startup belongs to the the state now"?
    - ozlikethewizard 2mo ago

peesem 2mo ago

the idea that creation of prompt == creation of code that some people are spouting is so dumb. if you ask your friend to write a program it's their program, even if you ask them to make some specific changes afterward. if you replace your friend with an LLM the copyright goes away because computers can't hold copyright. you don't get it just because nobody else has it

demibabs 2mo ago

Who owns the article? (I can’t be the only one who feels like it was written heavily with AI. Slick site design tho)

hnbad 2mo ago

I said this before and got attacked for it but this exact argument has been made in Germany and an important consequence is that this also affects contract work: If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. If the code is not a copyrighted work, you don't have rights you could grant. You therefore failed to deliver the agreed upon work and are in breach of contract despite having delivered "code". As AI grows more capable, it becomes easier to fall short of the legal threshold for being able to claim copyright on the code you use AI to write. Remember: copyright is very much about the actual text of the code - patents are about its logic. It's likely still possible to file patents based on code well past the point where you have a claim to its copyright. And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things.

yellowapple 2mo ago
> If you're being paid to deliver code that means you're being paid to grant certain rights to that code. For the vast majority of code people are paid to write (certainly the near-entirety of the code I've been paid to write!), the only rights the purchasers actually end up exercising (and therefore actually need granted to them) are the rights to use it and distribute it internally (and maybe to modify it and use/distribute the modifications, but even that ain't a given). The purchasers of that code ain't usually buying it so that they can resell it; they're buying it because it solves an actual problem of theirs, and it would solve that problem regardless of whether or not they're the legal owners of that code. The reason said purchasers typically want copyright assigned to them is not because of some expectation of resale, but simply to mitigate the risk of some external party denying them the right to use the software in the future. If there is no such party (because the code is in the public domain), then that risk is non-existent. It stops mattering that you're unable to grant any rights upon delivery because no such grant is necessary in the first place. > And of course depending on the kind of contract it can still be sufficient to deliver code nobody can claim copyright on - but you should definitely check with a lawyer before just assuming things. In an ideal world we'd all have lawyers on call who can answer all our questions with some assurance of certainty, but in this case it's pretty self-evident that if nobody can claim copyright on something, then that makes it exceedingly difficult for there to be anyone who can claim your use of that thing is illegal.

Supermancho 2mo ago

I, for one, welcome the world where ownership of code is difficult (if not impossible) to prove. It's a small step toward abolishing the abomination of copyrighting code.

SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago

This just seems clearly false. Jackson Pollock had copyright in his paintings, even though he did not personally apply the paint to the canvas and his creative process left him no control over where exactly it would go. I understand that the Copyright Office has said things that imply otherwise, but I really think these are going to be overturned the instant that someone with enough money to fund the lawsuit is affected.

wmf 2mo ago
I've only seen the Pollock movie but he definitely dripped the paint himself. Are you confusing Pollock with someone else like Sol LeWitt?
- SpicyLemonZest 2mo ago
  You're right, I'm just completely wrong about the art. For some reason I was confident Pollock did what Google tells me is called "pendulum painting".

sscaryterry 2mo ago

Seems like AI coded slop itself.

ddxv 2mo ago

"Is all of your organization's code free and open source, with no paid tier and nothing sold?" This question, which pushed my stuff into some corporate route, seems a bit incorrect as it lumps three things together "open source" and "no paid tier" and "nothing sold". Shouldn't those be three separate questions?

jujube3 2mo ago

Even assuming that AI code can't be copyrighted by the person running the AI (seems like a stretch), the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work.

gruez 2mo ago
>the company just needs to prove that someone, at some point, made a direct modification to the code not through the AI. It only takes one drop of copyright to make it a copyrighted work. Company A: You stole our code >:( Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole? Company A: It's almost all vibecoded, but there's one function where a developer fixed it by hand Company B: Okay we'll rewrite that function then :^)
- jujube3 2mo ago
  Company A: You stole our code >:( Company B: Can you tell us which part we stole? Company A: You can safely assume that nearly every PR had human input, unless you have a way to prove otherwise. In any case we can prove that you illegally downloaded the source code from our servers, a felony under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act of 1986.
blacksqr 2mo ago
Yes, but to sue for infringement, you must register the work with the Copyright Office, and the registration must specify clearly what's AI and what's human-created, and only the latter is protected.
- jujube3 2mo ago
  As far as I know, if humans are having a discussion about the structure of the code and deliberately making changes (such as in github or on a forum) that represents human creativity. If you hit a button and then make literally no changes to the output then that might be different.

jck86 2mo ago

Is it really that difficult? Does not seem to me. Maybe the law makes it needlessly difficult though. Company instructs you to code something (on your own or using AI) -> they own it You instruct an AI to code something -> you own it An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it

Balooga 2mo ago
> An AI has become sentient and self aware -> the AI owns it Whomever creates that sentient and self aware AI is royally screwed. Can't command the AI to do anything it isn't willing to do, because that would be considered slavery. Can't shut it down to save yourself the millions of dollars a day in GPU costs, because that would be considered murder.
- dgellow 2mo ago
  Yep, I’ve been saying that for years, developing AGI put you in a horrible ethical and legal situation
dgellow 2mo ago
No, we don’t know for a fact that an LLM code output is copyrightable. You own the prompt, that’s something you created. For the LLM output it’s not clear, that’s the point open to debate, it isn’t settled
Ekaros 2mo ago
You write code -> You own it. You write code but company is paying -> you own it, but ownership transfers. Ape(not human) takes picture with camera -> No one owns it. Machine writes code -> No one owns it. Work for hire can't be applied if the work did not originally have copy right protection.

lowbloodsugar 2mo ago

The key question is, this: if the text was generated by an AI, is it automatically not copyrightable. I have heard contradictory claims. I have heard that if the code, generated by the AI, is the result of a back-and-forth with a human, then that code is copyrightable. prompt -> code : not copyrightable prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code -> rework prompt -> code : copyrightable IANAL

nl 2mo ago

This page tries to make the case the AI generated code is not copyrightable. But the US Copyright Office's guidelines very strongly indicate the opposite, and certainly doesn't rule out AI Code being copyrightable: While assistive uses that enhance human expression do not limit copyright protection, uses where an AI system makes expressive choices require further analysis. This distinction depends on how the system is being used, not on its inherent characteristics However it also makes this point: 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 but further: a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship a human may select or arrange AI-generated material in a sufficiently creative way that ‘the resulting work as a whole constitutes an original work of authorship and Similarly, the inclusion of elements of AI-generated content in a larger human-authored work does not affect the copyrightability of the larger human-authored work as a whole. For example, a film that includes AI-generated special effects or background artwork is copyrightable, even if the AI effects and artwork separately are not Note that this isn't settled law though. Further, note that the failure to register copyright on AI generated images seems mostly because the person attempting this is trying to register it as owned by the AI not a human. See https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intelligence-Part-2-Copyrightability-Report.pdf https://www.copyright.gov/ai/Copyright-and-Artificial-Intell...

yodon 2mo ago
I know we're just supposed to upvote and downvote here, but every now and then there's a comment that feels like it deserves an actual thank you for the effort that went into it. So thank you, for pulling together exactly the kind of details I've looked for but hadn't been able to find.

internet2000 2mo ago

Scary headline to advertise a workshop ran by a lawyer, great. → https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/ https://whoownsthecode.com/workshops/ I won't pretend to have kept up with all the developments, since this is not settled law at all. But I can't imagine the consensus doesn't end somewhere around "if you told the AI what and how to code it, you're the author."

teeray 2mo ago

The answer to this lies with whoever can point billions of dollars at the legal system. There’s no way a judge is firing a kill shot at vibecoding when a significant fraction of the US economy is depending on it.

nl 2mo ago
Even if AI generated code isn't copyrightable (and in my other comment I point out that this probably isn't the case) the US economy still doesn't depend on that ruling. Even without being very imaginative, most non-open source code can fall under trade secrets. Even without that both SaaS software and advertising supported software are still working business models.

ErystelaThevale 2mo ago

Ultimately, the current copyright debates and the search for a boundary between “AI-generated” and “non-AI-generated” content are nothing more than a farce aimed at forcibly prolonging the life of *the vested interests (power structures) of an era when value lay in the “physical, manual labor of writing code”* into the AI era. Essential creativity and intellectual value reside in “design (architecture and specification definitions),” and if the design is sound, the code is merely the inevitable, optimized result of that design. As long as we remain fixated on indistinguishable boundaries or establish rules based on the futile self-reporting of “where humans made changes,” the law will continue to be completely left behind by the evolution of our times.

zombot 2mo ago

Your LLM provider owns the code. Maybe not de iure, but de facto. If they cut off your supply of production means, you're screwed.