Who owns the code Claude Code wrote?

  > The US Copyright Office confirmed this in January 2025, and the Supreme Court declined to disturb it in March 2026 when it turned away the Thaler appeal. Works predominantly generated by AI without meaningful human authorship are not eligible for copyright protection, and that rule is now settled at the highest judicial level available.

I'm concerned about the copyright 'washing' this enables though, especially in OSS, and I think the right thing for OSS devs to do is to try to publish resulting code with the strongest copyleft licensing that they are comfortable with - https://jackson.dev/post/moral-ai-licensing/

I think that the gold rush approach happening right now around me (my company EMs forcing me to work with claude as fast as possible) show really short-sight of all the management people.

First - I lose my understanding of the code base by relying too much on claude code.

Second - we drop all the good coding practices (like XP, code review etc.) because claude is reviewing claude's code.

Third - we just take a big smelly dump on the teamwork - it's easier and cheaper to let one developer drive the whole change from backend to frontend, despite there are (or were) two different teams - one for FE, one for BE.

Fourth - code commenting was passe, as the code is documentation itself... Unless... there is a problem with the context (which is). So when the people were writing the code, they would not understand the over-engineered code because of their fault. But now we make a step back for our beloved claude because it has small context... It's unfair treatment.

I could go on and on. And all those cultural changes are because of money. So I dub this "goldrush", open my popcorn and see what happens next.

The answer is probably "Nobody"!

After all, is this not what happens with compilers as well? LLM agents are just quite advanced compilers that don't require the specification to be as detailed as with traditional compilers.

This comes up in a few places as a kind of vindictive battle. One example is Oracle suing Google for too closely mimicking their API in Android. Here is an example:

> private static void rangeCheck(int arrayLen, int fromIndex, int toIndex) {

    if (fromIndex > toIndex)

        throw new IllegalArgumentException("fromIndex(" + 

                                           ") > toIndex(" + 

    if (fromIndex < 0)

        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(fromIndex);

    if (toIndex > arrayLen)

        throw new ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException(toIndex);

And it was deemed fair use by the Supreme Court. Other times high frequency hedge funds sued exiting employees, sometimes successfully. In America, anyone can sue you for any reason, so sure, you'll have Ellison take a feud up with Page and Brin all the way up to the Supreme Court.

In 99.9% of instances none of this matter. Sure there's the technical letter of the law but in practice, and especially now, none of this matters.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/18-956_d18f.pdf

https://www.vice.com/en/article/musicians-algorithmically-ge...

Is there any citation for this "legal consensus"? I was not aware there was any evidence backed stances on this topic as of yet

I use my own computer, I pay for my own subscription and I build my open source projects then the code belongs to me.

If I use my company's computer, they pay for my subscription and we work on the company's projects then the code belongs to the company.

In any step of the way if some copy-left or any other form of exotic open source license is violated, who pays for discovery? Is it someone in Russia who created a popular OSS library that is now owed? How will it be enforced?

And I'm worried that once that has been sufficiently normalized, laws and interpretations of them will adapt to whatever best suits those users. Which will mean copyrightwashing of FOSS. My only hope then is that surely if free software can be copyright-washed by the big guys, then so can the little guy copyright-wash the big guys' blockbuster movies or whatever, which might lead to some sort of reckoning.

Part of the problem with generated works is that it is lower effort like the person copying something. It’s not an activity that demands special protection like original authorship. I believe this is a large part of the reasoning.

Or is it still IP even if it is not copyrightable? That would feel weird: if it's in the public domain, then it's not IP, is it?

Twice in my career the owners of a company have wanted to sue competitors for stealing their "product" after poaching our staff.

Each time, the lawyers came in and basically told us that suing them for copyright is suicide, will inevitably be nearly impossible to prove, and money would be better spent in many other areas.

In fact, we ended up suing them (and they settled) for stealing our copyrighted clinical content, which they copied so blatantly they left our own typos and customer support phone number in it.

Go ahead, try to sue over your copyrighted code, 10 years and 100M later you will end up like Google v Oracle. What if the code is even 5% different? What about elements dictated by external constraints; hardware, industry standards, common programming practices, these aren't copyrightable.

Then you have merger doctrine, how many ways can we really represent the same basic functions?

Same goes with the copyleft argument, "code resembling copyleft" is incredibly vague, it would need to be verbatim the code, not resembling. Then you have the history of copyleft, there have been many abuses of copyleft and only ~10 notable lawsuits. Now because AI wrote it (which makes it _even harder_ to enforce), we will see a sudden outburst of copyleft cases? I doubt it.

Ultimately anyone can sue you for any reason, nothing is stopping anyone right now from suing you claiming AI stole their copyleft code.

But AI might in fact do the exact opposite and reverse the privatization trend that the West has been going through for the last 400 years. All of our copyright laws rely on the idea that there is a human consciousness behind the copyright. The more AI has input, the less we can claim ownership. If AI returns everything to the commons, then it results in a much more egalitarian world.

Hilariously, many people, especially artists, see the return of the commons as an assault against them. They’re so captured by copyright that they assume any infringement on their copyright is inherently fascist. It’s ridiculous. Copyright is a corporations number 1 weapon when it comes to creating a moat and keeping the masses out.

The original intent of copyright, in fact, was an incentive to return an idea to the commons. Experts used to hide their discoveries in order to keep them for themselves. Copyright provided an opportunity to release this knowledge and still profit. There were even several cases where it was established that those who claimed copyright could retain copyright even if the idea had been previously discovered. This created a huge incentive: release the knowledge or risk having your process copyrighted by the opposition. But that system worked because copyright could only exist for so long (14 years, doubled if they filed again.)

Now copyright is a lifelong sentence at almost 100 years. The entire purpose of it has been undermined. Corporations own all your childhood and by the time you can profit off of it, it’s outdated.

A world where the mainstream is primarily a commons seems to me like an egalitarian world. I’d like to live in that world.

If computer generated code is not copyrightable, ownership cannot be reassigned either.

Even steering it with prompts isn't enough. The guy couldn't copyright the image he made with ai, code is no different.

Maybe prompts written by humans are copyrightable.

Can't wait for the Billionaires to entrench in court they can steal everything for these machines and claim it as their own and maybe even reach for anything that it helps produce. Fuck that