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Comment by Sirened | Hacker News Reader

You aren't allowed to just read code and regurgitate it in order to claim it as your own. That is, just because you memorized this great new novel you read, it doesn't mean you can go and sit down and hammer it out and sell new copies. People go to great lengths to do this sort of things (see: clean room reverse engineering [1]) in order to try and wash themselves of liability.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

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If the code was purely utilitarian in nature, such as something that was optimized for execution time, there is plenty of precedent stating that the code in question is not covered by copyright.

Do an internet search for “copyright utilitarian” and read up on it if you don’t believe me!

Note: In the US, this concept is explicitly in the Copyright Act:

"In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." (17 USC 102(b) [0]).

See also the "Useful Articles" doctrine. [1]

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_St...

If you think most people pay any attention to licenses or respect them you better think again. Snippets get copied verbatim with no regard to their source all the time. Licenses have no power and are routinely ignored.

The point is not if the law is actually upheld or not. Its if it is legal or not.

Mmm maybe rephrase that as “depending upon which entity’s copyright was violated”

Surely I don’t need to recite the last 50 years of tech legal precedent and case history for you to see that such a blanket generalization cannot be left unaddressed.

Litigants litigate

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