Intellectual property
Rights to code, data and model output. Who is the author and what can be transferred.
Copyright needs a human. That single sentence settles most disputes about model output — and creates a problem at the same time, because nobody in the repository marked which lines came from an assistant.
The second place this breaks is procurement: a company pays for a rollout, receives a working system and is convinced it bought the rights to it. Usually it bought a licence — sometimes exclusive, sometimes only for as long as the maintenance contract runs.
A common argument
„We paid for the work, so the rights are ours.”
How it actually is
A transfer of copyright needs an express written clause, and its scope is read literally. An invoice transfers nothing, and "the right to use" is a licence, not ownership.
Questions I hear most often
- ? Who holds the rights to code written by our contractor?
- ? Can we commercially use what the model generated?
- ? What about the data we trained our own model on?
- ? May we resell a solution built on someone else’s licence?