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From: sewilco@mecc.MECC.COM (Scot E. Wilcoxon)
Newsgroups: misc.legal,comp.unix.wizards
Subject: Re: Copyrighting trivial code
Message-ID: <853@mecc.MECC.COM>
Date: Fri, 23-Jan-87 15:03:24 EST
Article-I.D.: mecc.853
Posted: Fri Jan 23 15:03:24 1987
Date-Received: Sat, 24-Jan-87 13:45:47 EST
References: <2567@phri.UUCP>
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Reply-To: sewilco@mecc.UUCP (Scot E. Wilcoxon)
Organization: Minn Ed Comp Corp, St. Paul
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Xref: mnetor misc.legal:709 comp.unix.wizards:721

In article <2567@phri.UUCP> roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith) writes:
>[description of a one-line copyrighted program]
>	The obvious question is whether the copyright notice means
>anything.  Can one really copyright something which is so straightforward,
>trivial, and obvious?  If you gave the assignment "write a C program which
>...

As other posters have noted, you can copyright any program which you authored.
(You actually can copyright other programs also, but let's not hash over that
in this discussion)

"Obviousness" does not concern copyrights.  It does concern patents.  A valid
patent is for something which is not obvious to an engineer in the subject
matter.  The patent law language is only a little less vague than that, but
is intended to not grant patents to very obvious solutions.

"Obvious" is implied as being before the patent applicant's discovery.  After
an engineer knows of such a discovery, it often is obvious.  (Only load
memory pages from disk when demanded?  Of course! :-)
-- 
Scot E. Wilcoxon   Minn Ed Comp Corp  {quest,dayton,meccts}!mecc!sewilco
(612)481-3507           sewilco@MECC.COM       ihnp4!meccts!mecc!sewilco
   
  "Who's that lurking over there?  Is that Merv Griffin?"