Re: PepperfishProfiler

[Jamie Webb <j@...>]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2004 at 12:21:06PM -0700, William Roper wrote:
> > I think you'll find those snippets were either out-of-context or
> > out-of-date.
 
> I dunno, I found the second one here:
> http://www.washburn.edu/copyright/glossary/
> 
> Its a copyright information site for students and faculty of a university.

Which appears to have been typed in a hurry. From your quote, I
suspect 'registration' should be 'legislation'. Further up, it says
the same thing that I've been saying.

> Besides that, I think anything under the Wiki probably falls under
> "works created for public use".

Again, I suspect the intended meaning is 'created for public use by
the government'. Publishing something on a website does not void your
copyright.

> Looking briefly at the copyright laws on the U.S. copyright office
> website, code snippets might fall under:
> "102 (b) 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."

Short snippets of code are a slightly grey area. There are only so
many ways of doing a particular thing. In particular, it has been
suggested that small patches, e.g. bugfixes, submitted to the author
of a larger program, do not entitle the patch author to any control
over the result as a derived work based on the patch.

Entire programs though are most definitely covered by copyright law!

-- Jamie Webb