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To the last point, courts do actually try to solve this. The goal of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikiped

To the last point, courts do actually try to solve this. The goal of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction-Filtration-Compari... that gets used is, in fact, to abstract things, eliminate the non-copyrightable parts, and try to see if any important stuff is left. Wikipedia actually has a fairly good explanation of it in practice. So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law, for literary works, is just not a match for how software tends to actually be developed, which is that "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected". (and before people argue that it could be millions of lines, the US, thankfully, refuses to have a sweat of the brow doctrine)

AnthonyMouse 10y ago
> So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law, for literary works, is just not a match for how software tends to actually be developed, which is that "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected". It's not even that. It's that the debugging is the hard part. The general idea of what the code should do is easy. Getting all the edge cases right is hard. The result is that a) any two working implementations are going to be functionally equivalent (by tautology, because that's what "working" means), and b) "non-literal copying" doesn't actually help the "infringer" because anything short of literal copying or literal translation (meaning the thing a compiler does), is going to require you to redo the hard part anyway.
amag 10y ago
> "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected" I think a better analogy would be that most parts of software (i.e. functions) can be thought of as words in literary works, it's not how you spell them but rather how you string them together that makes the work unique.

AnthonyMouse 10y ago

> So they are actually trying, and the real problem is that existing copyright law, for literary works, is just not a match for how software tends to actually be developed, which is that "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected". It's not even that. It's that the debugging is the hard part. The general idea of what the code should do is easy. Getting all the edge cases right is hard. The result is that a) any two working implementations are going to be functionally equivalent (by tautology, because that's what "working" means), and b) "non-literal copying" doesn't actually help the "infringer" because anything short of literal copying or literal translation (meaning the thing a compiler does), is going to require you to redo the hard part anyway.

amag 10y ago

> "most code is worthless, there is very little that really should be protected" I think a better analogy would be that most parts of software (i.e. functions) can be thought of as words in literary works, it's not how you spell them but rather how you string them together that makes the work unique.