it's well known that recipes cannot be copyrighted. But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.
Recipes cannot be copyrighted because they are not expressions of human creativity. Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity, so the balance is tilted in favor of AI generated copy not being copyrightable.
The Supreme Court or legislation could change this, and I'd guess there will be a movement to go in that direction, but till something like that succeeded it's not so.
> Claude code itself is a trade secret, and it is not open source, so its own copyrightability is moot till you get your hands on a copy of it with clean hands.
In this case Anthropic published the Claude Code source map file on npm themselves. https://venturebeat.com/technology/claude-codes-source-code-...
> But recipes still are protected intellectual property by trade secret law if they are treated as a secret by the holder of the recipe.
Trade secrets aren't very well protected, though.
You can sue the person who leaked/stole your secret, but if others keep sharing it once it is leaked you can do nothing to them.
> Software written by AIs are also not expressions of human creativity
I mean I'm not the biggest fan of AI on the planet by any means (which I think my post history would prove, lol), but isn't prompt design and steering the AI "human creativity"? In one of my AI-assisted projects I spent like a week in unending threads of posts trying to make the AI do stuff the way I wanted, testing the output, finding a bazillion of bugs and "basic bitch" solutions, asking for more robust this and edge case that. It felt like I wrote a novel. How is that not creativity (Crayon-eater or Picasso, creativity is creativity)?
I wonder when my manager "prompts" me "I want the feature X and I want it fast", is his prompt a human creativity?
To some extent yes. Your output at work is based on a combination of inputs from others in your organization, and is being paid for by your employer, so the organization owns the copyright on what you make for them.
I think from this view it makes sense that an LLM is a tool, and the operator of that tool (or their employer) can own the output.
The tricky part is when you squint and view an LLM with training input and prompted output as a machine that launders copyrighted input into customized output that is now copyrighted by a new owner.
A machine that vacuums up film reels and splices them according to a set of instructions by the user to create a compilation of recent animated Disney movies with the Shrek soundtrack superimposed would probably not pass legal challenges if the user of the tool attempted to claim full copyright on the output.