I'm curious about the endgame of copyright with respect to software. At some point, enough people will have written enough code that you can't write code anymore because some fragment of it violates a copyright. Where does the line get drawn? There's only so many ways to do certain algorithms, like DFS or BFS.
At some point it'll have to come home to roost that code is a subset of discrete mathematics first, a literary/artistic work second. There is really no way around it.
>you can't write code anymore because some fragment of it violates a copyright
Copyright (unlike patents in general) allows for independent creation. If I sit down to write a quicksort routine, it is going to look extremely similar to a zillion other quicksort routines out there.
The other question (IANAL) is whether writing a quicksort routine is even a creative act at this point.
A user once replied to one of my comment[0] about this with the following:
> It's not really an issue when you're a large software corporation; you already have mechanisms in place to check for license compliance in everything that ships, including F/OSS plagiarism checks [1].
IOW, from my understanding, they don't care. Big players do their own checks anyway, and small fish won't be creating problems because it's too convenient for them. Classic Microsoft (as I know from 90s).
The bigger thread can be seen in [2].
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32534697
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32539467
[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32533531