alt Hacker NewsThe 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.
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I can't see how that can work.
As a developer, the fact that my source code passed through a compiler - an automated tool - doesn't give the author of the compiler any claim on my executable code.
As an artist, the fact that I used, e.g., Rebelle to paint a digital painting, or that I used Lightroom (including generative AI to fill, or other ML/AI tools to de-noise and sharpen my image) in editing a photograph, doesn't give EscapeMotion, Adobe, or Topaz, any claims to my product.
Why, then, would there be any chance that use of a tool like Claude - a tool that's super-advanced to be sure, but at the end of the day operates by way of a mathematical algorithms - would confer any claims to Anthropic?
If a court later found the codebase was predominantly AI-authored and therefore not copyrightable
Is figuring out the appropriate prompts to use in directing Clause qualitatively different than using a (much) higher-level abstraction in coding? That is, there was never any talk as we climbed the abstraction layer from machine code to assembly to Fortran or C to 4GLs to Rust etc., that the assembler/compiler/IDE builder would have any ownership claim on the produced executable. In what sense can Anthropic et al assert that their tool, which just transforms our directives to some lower-level representation, creates ownership of that lower-level representation?
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.
I 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.