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I'm not a programmer by any means. I am involved with writing though, and often I have to draw on other people's work to support an assertion I'm making. I jus

• pmjordan 18y ago
  With regard to copyright, it's usually a question of quantity. Up to 10 lines of code is often regarded irrelevant for copyright purposes. Of course, it's not as simple as that: 10 lines in how concise a language, etc. But it's not a big problem most of the time, in the same way literary or other human-language text is copyrighted but it's still acceptable to quote and cite. But ideas themselves don't fall under copyright; unfortunately, some countries allow the patenting of software algorithms, which do cover the idea to some extent.
• kragen 18y ago
  It's an interesting question how much code you can copy under the fair use doctrine. I don't think I've ever seen it tested in court.