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.

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beej71 15 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

I love that genAI art will not be copyrightable and genAI code will be. The power of the Almighty Dollar at work.

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senaevren 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The 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 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Work-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 LLMs are just code stealers, will gladly generate Carmacks inverse for you with original comments.

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embedding-shape 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Best 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.

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conartist6 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It'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)

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wongarsu 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The 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 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Well 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!!