> I don't understand how you make the leap from "if copyright can apply to legal documents it can also apply to arbitrary physical objects". You can replace "g

> I don't understand how you make the leap from "if copyright can apply to legal documents it can also apply to arbitrary physical objects". You can replace "garage" with whatever you want. Basically, if I'm a contractor I can sue every other contractor for uncreative derivative works. If I'm installing garages, I can sue my competitors. If I'm selling software, I can sue my competitors. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_work Even if it doesn't succeed 100% of the time, there is a non-zero chance people will settle. There's a non-zero chance that I can prevent other people from creating businesses in my market by simply writing every potential variation of some common contract elements. That's why this is absurd that contracts can be copyrighted. You can argue that you'd have to prove intent, but people do that every day with news stories and win (I have a reporter friend that has been sued multiple times for 'copying stories' that they themselves wrote -- they win most of the time. In one case, I was sitting right beside him on the train while he wrote the story from his interview notes. The 'plaintive' tends to create a verbatim story on the web and change the publish date to some date in the past, then 'proves' they wrote it first. They don't win, but they do cause stories to be 'redacted' until it can be proven one way or the other. By then though, the news is old news.)