endrift 🏳️‍⚧️6h ago
Everyone is talking about the LLM rewrite of Claude Code being uncopyrightable, but that's missing the point: that does that mean it can't violate copyright. It also ignores the even bigger elephant in the room: if LLM code isn't copyrightable, then the majority of Claude Code itself isn't copyright-protected in the first place.
Show threadendrift 🏳️‍⚧️6h ago

IANAL so I can't 100% speak to the former point, but the latter point is...a simple conclusion from what we already know about gen AI copyright.

I really hope someone with a lot of resources posts that Claude Code leak, gets DMCA'd, then actually fights back. Let's show big tech that using LLM coding agents is a legal risk from yet another angle.

Show threadBrandon5h ago

@endrift what really interests me is whether Anthropic will argue and if so will prevail in saying that the system prompts are copyrightable. From what we know about LLM output, the codebase of Claude Code should fail to satisfy the human authorship requirement if it’s LLM generated, but there’s a greater chance a human wrote the system prompts. The question with those is whether they are actually expressive works or just functional. Scenes a faire and merger doctrine both trim the edges on a work’s expressivity by deciding parts of a work are so ubiquitous or insignificant that they don’t deserve protection, so then the inquiry is how much of a prompt is left after that.

Are they sending real DMCA notices or just platform based requests?

Show threadendrift 🏳️‍⚧️
@be_far Presumably platform-based requests, though those are still real DMCA notices AIUI. But yeah there's a lot of interesting legal ground to be broken here.
11:08pmWeb
Show threadBrandon5h ago

@endrift DMCA notices require six formalities to be effective, and since the DMCA does not require providing an actual copy of the notice to the uploader, there’s no way to know whether the formalities are actually present in any given DMCA notice provided to a platform. A platform will not get into legal trouble with a copyright holder for enforcing a request which lacks the formalities. And their terms and conditions will often prevent them from liability if they keep a work taken down after receiving a counter notice from the uploader and waiting the 14 days.

There are a lot of ways to design a platform to be compliant with the DMCA that screws over the user, and that’s often what happens, preventing the user from effectively using the safeguards that are in the DMCA.