Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

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This is all well and good as an intellectual exercise, but in real life none of this matters. Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat. I've written the same chunks of code for a number of employers as has every engineer. We've all taken chunks from stack overflow and other places without carefully considering attribution.

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(" +

fromIndex +

                                           ") > toIndex(" +

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

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable or seriously thinks their code is a moat.

You'd be surprised! Among non-software management types, they often think of the code as extremely valuable IP and a trade secret. I'm a CTO and I've made comments before to non/less technical peers about how the code (generally speaking) isn't that big of a secret, and I routinely get shocked expressions. In one case the company almost passed on a big contract because it required disclosure of the source code (with an NDA). When I told them that was a silly reason and explained why, they got it, but the old way of thinking still permeates and is a hard habit to break.

Edit: Fixed errant copy pasta error. Glad that wasn't a password :-)

Totally agreed.

I work in M&A. Nearly every lawyer, accountant, investor, and software business owner thinks their code is solely valuable and a trade secret. I find it hilarious and try to be as diplomatic as possible about why it's not. They also willfully will give their client list to a potential acquirer but get super cagey they moment a third party provider asks for their code to be scanned.

This argument easily gets shut down when I asked why, Twitch, a $1B business didn't crater to their competition when their full codebase was leaked.

You're right, I guess maybe I mean in any serious actionable way. Senior, non technical people leave plenty of money on the table by thinking they're protecting something valuable or they have some kind of secret sauce. It's all silly is what I meant to say, and digging into the technicalities of whether your code is truly copyrightable is kind of pointless. It's all vibes.

The place where it concretely matters is M&A due diligence. Acquirers are now routinely asking about AI tool usage in development and running license scans as a condition of closing. A codebase that cannot demonstrate human authorship over its core IP, or that contains GPL contamination, creates a representation and warranty problem in the purchase agreement. For most companies day to day you are right. For the companies that get acquired or raise institutional capital, the question becomes very concrete very quickly.

Very interesting, I had no idea. That's probably going to be a very painful lesson learned by all the startups that have been pumping out AI code. I know of several just among my peer groups that will be shocked and dismayed by this. Thanks for sharing that!

That is exactly the gap the piece is aimed at. The M&A conversation is where this becomes concrete very fast, and most founders shipping AI-assisted code have not had it yet.

Eh, it does and it doesn't. PE investors actively are asking why more of the portfolio companies aren't generating codebases using Claude Code. You are right that lawyers are asking about code generated by LLMs but this is more of a CYA out of ignorance more than anything else (btw - many purchase agreements have funny representations like "your code is free of bugs" which is downright hilarious).

So these two things are squarely at odds with eachother...meaning, I don't know any PE acquirers who are actively terminating deals because the target acquisition's code is generating by an LLM even if the lawyers try to get a rep about it in the purchase agreement.

For the record, I still have yet to have an M&A lawyer explain to me unilaterally that AI generated code is an infringement...hence the question "who owns the code Claude Code writes" is still open.

The tension you are describing is real and the piece does not capture it well enough. PE acquirers pushing portfolio companies toward Claude Code while their lawyers are adding AI code reps to purchase agreements is exactly the gap that will produce the first painful deal. The rep usually survives unsigned because neither side has done the analysis. When the first deal falls apart or a rep is breached post-close because of GPL contamination in an AI-assisted codebase, that will set the market standard faster than any court ruling.

> When the first deal falls apart or a rep is breached post-close because of GPL contamination in an AI-assisted codebase, that will set the market standard faster than any court ruling.

Assuming it ever does...first, GPL is hardly enforced and second, I feel like there is going to be enough money (e.g. Anthropic's own code it uses for the harness) that pushes back against it being problematic. We'll see.

I’ve worked at too many places where I mused that if someone gave the source code to the competitors, it’d likely drive the competitors out of business as they tried to use it.

Keeping it proprietary probably has the greatest value in preserving the company’s reputation…

Maybe LLM coding agents change the equation by making it much easier to adapt and use foreign and probably incomplete code. Getting you closer to competing with the original authors in a shorter amount of time than generating new code from scratch.

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable

I think this is an unusual opinion.

Code may not be copyrightable in as small chunks as you put there, but in terms of larger pieces I think companies and individuals very often labour under the belief that code is intellectual property under copyright law.

If code isn't copyrightable, from where comes the GPL?

And why does anyone care if (for instance) some Microsoft code might have accidentally ended up in ReactOS, causing that project to need to go into a locked-down review mode for months or years? For that matter why do employers assert that they own the copyright in contracts?

I think it's the opposite - almost everyone thinks their code is copyrightable, outside of APIs and interop stuff, or things so simple as to be trivial.

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable

Then why does reverse engineered code need to be a clean room implementation?

Ask any emulator developer or the developers of ReactOS

https://reactos.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=21740

Nobody ever talks about convergence.

You, right now, are taking about convergence.

If there is no artwork, there can be no copyright. If every character of the code to write is basically predetermined by the APIs you need to call, there is no artwork and no copyright.

Build a novel new API, and you'll be protected though.

> Almost no one thinks their code is copyrightable

Every open source license is built on the premise that code is copyrightable.

No.

It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.

So what is held as true is only the implication stated above and not the truth value of the claims that either kind of licenses are valid.

If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.

The open source licenses are intended as defenses against the people who would otherwise attempt to claim ownership of that code and apply a proprietary license to the code, i.e. exactly what now Anthropic and the like have done, together with their corporate customers.

Of course, if it is accepted that the code generated by an AI coding assistant is not copyrightable, then using it would not really be a violation of the original open source licenses. The problem is that even if this principle is the one accepted legally, at least for now, both Anthropic and their corporate customers appear to assume that they own the copyright for this code that should have been either non-copyrightable or governed by the original licenses of the code used for training.

Yes.

“ Copyright <YEAR> <COPYRIGHT HOLDER>

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the “Software”), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

The copyright assertion is the very first line of the MIT license, and the right to copy the code is granted. Clearly a reasonable person would affirm that that license (and all similar licenses) are based on a premise that code can be copyrighted.

> It is based on the premise that if the proprietary licenses are valid, then also the open source licenses are valid.

>If the proprietary licenses are not valid, then it does not matter that also the open source licenses are not valid.

That’s not true. Imagine a world where proprietary licenses are made invalid.

In such a world a company could take open source code compile it and distribute it (or build a SaaS) without the source code.

Even if you only focus on licenses that don’t prohibit this, most of those licenses require attribution.

So even in a world where propriety licenses were invalid the majority of open source licenses would still have a purpose.

You’re attempting to split hairs to argue on a very subtle technicality, but you’re not even technically right.

MIT just disclaims all the author's rights except attribution. If it turns out the code isn't copyrightable, nothing really changes. A better example would be GPL.

I mentioned that in my comment, but attribution is a big deal.

Why were the HFT firms suing employees?

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