>it suggests that even reproducing the smallest excerpts of protected works constitutes copyright infringement Actually, it is. It has to do with whether the s

>it suggests that even reproducing the smallest excerpts of protected works constitutes copyright infringement Actually, it is. It has to do with whether the small excerpt is copying what could be called "the heart of the work"; which in the case of code I would argue is almost always what you are after. No one's gonna copy the indentation style, boilerplate around functions/blocks, punctuation, etc. You always go for the "functional" part of the code, which is definitely "the heart of the work". The heart of Carmack's fast inverse square root lies in its selection of a particular set of constants and operations that happen (i.e. were designed) to approximate the square root without taking an expensive path. Copyright law would look at this novelty; I don't think it would argue around "the use of subtraction and multiplication in a computer program", as that would be plainly stupid. I am surprised that someone who is supposedly an expert in copyright law does not (or pretends not to know) about this, not only that, but to actually suggest the opposite. This is copyright 101, come on.