Who Owns the Code AI Writes for You? Part II
The question sounds simple. The answer most people reach for is the wrong one, and it is aimed at the wrong problem.
by Dave Rosenlund & Manohar Goli
In "Who Owns an App Created with Rovo?," fellow Atlassian Community Champion Dr. Valeri Colon explores a question that circulated through the Atlassian Community Champions Slack group for weeks. It began when another Champion, @Darryl Lee, downloaded the source of an app built in Rovo Studio and found a LICENSE file in the downloaded source: “Copyright (c) 2026 Atlassian.”
Read that cold and your stomach drops.
You described an app in plain language, Rovo built it, and now there is an Atlassian copyright notice living in your code. So who owns the thing you just made?
Valeri's article does an excellent job answering that question. Reading it made us realize we were all chasing the same assumption. We were asking who owned the code before asking whether AI-generated code could be protected at all.
That question is worth answering. It is also hiding a better one.
Ownership was never the hard part
Here is the part almost everyone gets backwards. Ownership, in the contractual sense, is mostly settled, and mostly boring.
Every serious AI vendor hands you the output. Read their terms and you'll see the same move. OpenAI, Anthropic, and the rest "assign" you all their right, title, and interest in what the model produces. Look closer and you'll find two words doing an enormous amount of work: "if any."
They can only give you what they have. And under current copyright law, what they have may be nothing.
The U.S. Copyright Office has been clear. In the U.S. at least, copyright protects human-created work.
Purely machine-generated output, produced without meaningful human authorship, does not qualify, and prompting alone does not clear the bar. A federal appeals court reached the same place in the Thaler case, and this past March the Supreme Court declined to revisit it.
So sit with the implication.
Your chosen AI vendor can assign you ownership of generated code, and that code can still be unprotectable. You own it on paper. You may not be able to stop anyone from copying it.
That is the trap. All of the liability, none of the protection.
You can own something you cannot protect
This is the point that should change how you read every one of these license files.
The market has trained us to treat "who owns it" as the whole question. For AI-generated code, that is the easy half. The hard half is protectability. What can you defend, and how.
Ownership you get by signing an agreement. Protection you earn by leaving human fingerprints on the work, and by being able to show them. The more the design, judgment, selection, and revision came from a person, the more there is to protect. The less human contribution there is, the less there may be to protect.
Neither of us is a lawyer, and nothing here should be taken as legal advice. It is the pattern that runs through the Copyright Office's own guidance, and through the way careful teams are starting to work.
The Atlassian panic runs backward
Now back to that LICENSE file, because the Rovo Studio version of this fear is the mirror image of the market's.
In the open market, the worry is "I own it but I can't protect it." With Rovo Studio, the worry was the opposite. That copyright notice looked like proof that you don't own your app at all.
Read Atlassian's own Developer Terms and the panic dissolves. Section 13 says it plainly: "Atlassian does not claim ownership of your Marketplace Apps," and "you own all intellectual property and other rights in your Marketplace Apps (including any Marketplace App source code you submit to Atlassian)." A Rovo Studio app is a Forge app. The terms that govern it hand ownership to you.
The stray notice was even pointing at those same terms. And those terms say the opposite of what the notice seemed to imply.
It turns out the notice was a mistake. An Atlassian informed us recently that their legal team has said the license file in question was an error, and that Atlassian is not claiming copyright. A fix was on the way when we last checked. Apps generated before that fix will keep the file, so if you built something in Studio and still see the header, it does not mean what it looks like it means.
Same anxiety as the rest of the market, flipped on its head, and settled by reading the contract that was there all along.
What earns protection
So what does a practitioner do with all of this? Not as legal instruction, but as operational habit.
Watch where the human work lives, and keep the evidence. The requirements you defined, the architecture you shaped, the prompts you wrote, the outputs you kept and the ones you threw away, the code you edited until it worked. That trail is where protection comes from, and it is exactly what a bare pile of generated code lacks.
Read the parts of the vendor terms nobody reads. The ownership line is the headline. The conditions are the fine print, and the fine print is where the real protections and the real exclusions live, especially around who defends you if a third party comes knocking.
Mind your licenses. AI assistants learn from public code, and they sometimes reproduce it. On Forge that is not an abstract worry, because Atlassian's terms forbid copyleft-licensed code in Forge apps outright. An assistant that quietly hands you a GPL-flavored snippet has handed you a problem.
And take Atlassian's AI terms at their word. Output is your data to use, but it "may not be unique or exclusive" to you. Useful is not the same as ownable.
Who owns it when the machine builds it
Valeri’s article began with a license file that appeared to raise an ownership question. It turned out the ownership question had a clear answer. The harder discovery was that ownership was never the limiting factor.
As AI gets better at building software, the conversation changes. The interesting question is no longer whether an AI can generate an application. It is whether the thing you've generated is something the law recognizes as yours to protect, and whether you can demonstrate the human authorship behind it.
That is a much more consequential shift than a misplaced copyright notice.
For decades, we treated ownership and protection as though they naturally came together. AI has broken that assumption. Contracts can transfer ownership. They cannot create copyright where the law says none exists.
So, "Who owns it?" is still a reasonable place to begin.
It just isn't where the conversation ends anymore.
The more important question is becoming, "What can I actually protect, and can I prove why?"
That question extends well beyond Rovo Studio, Forge, or Atlassian. It reaches every AI coding assistant, every enterprise building software with generative AI, and every organization assuming ownership means the same thing it always has.
It doesn't.
And that may turn out to be the more significant change.
There is another question waiting behind this one. If AI can build an application from a prompt, who gets to sell it, and who gets paid? That conversation reaches beyond copyright into marketplaces, commercial rights, and the future role of software partners. That's a conversation we'll explore next.
📚 Further Reading
This article is part of an ongoing AI/Rovo Article Series exploring responsible AI adoption.
See also...
- Who Owns an App Created with Rovo? — the predecessor article that sparked this deeper look at ownership and protectability, Dr. Valeri Colon
- Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 2: Copyrightability — the U.S. Copyright Office’s guidance on human authorship and AI-generated work, U.S. Copyright Office
- Atlassian Developer Terms — Section 13 explains ownership of Marketplace and Forge applications, Atlassian
- AI Makes Securing Copyright Protection for Software Code Tricky — a practical look at documenting human contribution in AI-assisted software development, Michael Justus, Carlton Fields / Bloomberg Law
Dave Rosenlund is Global Director of Software & Solutions at Trundl, an Atlassian Platinum Solution Partner | Enterprise, and an Atlassian Community Champion. Manohar Goli, Co-Founder and CTO of Trundl and a former Atlassian Community Champion, contributed to it.
Nothing in this article constitutes legal advice. For questions about your specific circumstances, consult qualified legal counsel.
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Dave Rosenlund _Trundl_
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