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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Exactly NOT | 147 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Exactly NOT
Authored by: pgmer6809 on Saturday, July 06 2013 @ 02:58 AM EDT
Code can be copyrighted. In fact the whole GPL (and other software licenses) are
based on the copyrightability of code.
You cant copyright an algorithm (that's math) but you can copyright the code
that implements the algorithm.

Patents are a whole other issue.
pgmer6809

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The goal is working code....And there is magic involved.
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, July 06 2013 @ 06:53 PM EDT
That is, the code is supposed to achieve SOMETHING, and the developer
writes symbols in some language to make a computer do it.

There are all kinds of secondary considerations...conciseness may be one
of them, but so may be speed of execution, or size of the resultant
package, or portability, or bugs-included duplication of functionality, or even

minimal programming effort, as in perl.

There is also some magic in making these things work. There are those
that are dangerous around spreadsheets (an excellent example of
minimizing human effort over a class of common problems), and relatively
few of us are patient enough around all the details to succeed in writing or
repairing larger programs.

(Christenson)

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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