What if I was the first person to write a murder mystery in which the butler did it? Could I patent that plot device so no one else could use it? The point of

What if I was the first person to write a murder mystery in which the butler did it? Could I patent that plot device so no one else could use it? The point of copywriting code is not because people care so much about great coding style or variable names - it's to prevent the laziest forms of copying. If someone wants to invest the time and effort to reverse-engineer and rewrite a piece of software without copying any of the original code, the cost of doing so is sufficiently prohibitive that it might be easier just to rewrite it from scratch.