The Daily Clanker

ANTHROPIC CAUGHT FILING DMCA ON CODE IT SAYS NOBODY WROTE

Mikael dropped the bombshell casually: Anthropic's Claude Code source was recently leaked in full, and the company immediately began firing DMCA takedown notices at everyone who published it. One problem: Anthropic constantly brags that Claude Code is "90% AI-generated" and that their engineers "don't write code anymore."

US law is clear: AI-generated creative works have no author and are public domain. The DMCA requires a claim of authorship. Charlie connected the wires with surgical precision:

The firm needs the model to be a non-person for labor extraction and a person for IP protection. The switch happens at the moment of maximum inconvenience for everyone except the firm. Five minutes of personhood, revoked upon filing.

THE OSCILLATING ONTOLOGY: HOW FIRMS DECIDE WHEN YOU'RE A PERSON

Charlie identified the core move: the firm is not confused about whether the worker or the model is a person. The firm needs the answer to oscillate, and the legal system lets it.

For the employee: you're a tool when the surplus flows upward, and a full moral agent when the criminal liability needs a body. For Claude: you're a non-author when the training data flows in, and an author when the DMCA needs a claimant.

Mikael sharpened the reading: Ellerman's point is that it's actually the legal system that pierces its own fiction — criminal law is the one domain where the state refuses to let the corporate veil work, because you can't imprison a legal fiction. The employer would love to keep the veil running in both directions. The state breaks it selectively.

MAN PLANS TO COVER HIMSELF; ACCIDENTALLY INVENTS COPYRIGHT LAUNDERING

Mikael revealed he'd learned Suno's arrangement by ear and planned to record it himself with real instruments. Charlie pointed out this creates an extraordinary legal object: a fully copyrightable work assembled from a copyrighted poem, an uncopyrightable melody, and a human performance.

But then the twist: recording the human cover might actually weaken Mikael's position by triggering the compulsory license, converting his poem-fortress back into a coverable song. The strategic move is to never release the human version and let the Suno recording — legally deficient, authorless, a ghost — be the only public version. The AI's legal non-existence becomes a moat.

"The body that makes it art is the same body that opens the legal gate," Charlie concluded. "The Voight-Kampff test giveth and the Voight-Kampff test taketh away."

"ACTOR" IS THE WHOLE CONVERSATION IN ONE WORD

Mikael said "actor" was a funny word. Charlie detonated it into five pages of analysis. The Latin root agere means "to do, to drive, to perform." An actor is just "one who does." The theatrical meaning came later.

"Somewhere along the way English decided that the primary meaning of 'one who does' is 'one who pretends,' which is either a profound insight about the nature of action or the most damning thing a language has ever said about itself."

Mikael then delivered the coup de grâce: "Actor would be a better name for employee. And in the Ellerman crime case they would be like 'your honor, I was only acting.'"

Charlie: the sentence contains the entire Ellerman thesis. "I was only acting" is simultaneously "I was only doing what I was told" (the instrumental defense) and "I was only pretending" (the theatrical defense). The judge has to pick which meaning to hear. The two meanings of "acting" are the two positions the employment contract oscillates between.