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From: earlw@pesnta.UUCP (Earl Wallace)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Copyrighting trivial code
Message-ID: <3520@pesnta.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 21-Jan-87 12:04:38 EST
Article-I.D.: pesnta.3520
Posted: Wed Jan 21 12:04:38 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 22-Jan-87 01:47:03 EST
References: <2567@phri.UUCP>
Reply-To: earlw@pesnta.UUCP (Earl Wallace)
Organization: Concurrent Computer Corporation / Customer Service
Lines: 27
Xref: mnetor misc.legal:675 comp.unix.wizards:671

In article <2567@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:

> ...
> anything.  Can one really copyright something which is so straightforward,
> trivial, and obvious?  If you gave the assignment "write a C program which
> prints the system page size in decimal to stdout" to 50 programmers, most
> of them would come up with substantially the same program, and many would
> probably be identical, character for character, to the 4.3 version.  If the
> copyright is valid, then any program I write which has that line of code,
> or a similar line of code, in it would be a derivitive work.  Clearly this
> is absurd.
>... 

I think the copyright is just a legal way to telling the World that you intend 
to protect your "code" in a court of law if necessary.  We all know how 
expensive lawers and court cases can be, so I would wonder about a company that
would go thru all the trouble to protect small pieces of code (unless that
code was really great and worth protecting).

P.S. - I copyrighted the following code and you may not use it without paying
       me $1,000,000.95 for each copy:

		/* Copyright 1987 Earl Wallace, All Rights Reserved */
		main()
		{

:-) see you in court!