You could state they are not the first to write this which would be more correct.
You could state they are not the first to write this which would be more correct.
Significant enough that if the license is GPL (which some has been) it will "taint" the entire codebase and license it under GPL. Significant enough to be found by automated OSS audit tools, which would trigger a re-write and education for the developer who committed it.
EDIT:
> If I write down lyrics I remember I still wrote it.
Not from a copyright point of view. The rights to those lyrics belong to the songwriter. It's kinda like photographs. You don't automatically have the right to distribute a photograph of yourself that was taken by someone else.
That "significant enough [...] to taint the entire codebase" remains to be decided in court.
I am not a lawyer, but that's been enough to get people in legal trouble in the US.
I doubt any employer would appreciate being this particular guinea pig because one of their employees wanted to avoid writing some boilerplate.