A single page pamphlet can be copyrighted every bit as well as a 1000 page book, or a set of encyclopedias, or for that matter, a web page or an entire web site.

And, if someone wants to extend the argument to patents, a novel form of mousetrap is as protectable as an enormous machine. While software patents wrongly remain law, a genuinely inventive 3 line algorithm is as protectable as a novel GUI involving a million lines.

In theory, the law in every civilised country has no regard for the size or scale of anything. Large and small, and for that matter rich and poor, are supposed to be treated exactly equally. So size does not matter. One classic case where the law is applied regardless of the magnitude of a criminal offence was the way in which phone hackers were dealt with in the UK in the 1970s. The offence was "stealing electricity" (there not being any other available law at the time), and I don't think that any of those who were fined heavily or even jailed at the time, had used even a single unit of the currency in use at the time, i.e. 1p.

The one exception is when text, or program source, or anything similar, becomes de minimis, because things as small as single characters, words, or common phrases, if protectable, would make the normal functions of society impossible. But even the tiniest of BIOSes is not going to be de minimis.

Incidentally, the UK phone hackers did nothing but dial numbers in a public call box. The way it worked was that there was a bug in the Inverness exchange, so from one of the outlying villages you could dial the area code for Inverness, followed by the code for your own village, followed again if I remember correctly by the code for Inverness, followed by any number anywhere in the world (not many countries would have been available without needing to go via the operator, so it was not as far-ranging as it seemed). It set up some kind of loop that bypassed the charging mechanism. In those days the General Post Office had a monopoly on all telecoms and postal services, with one exception, and they relentlessly persued the hackers, tying up a vast amount of police resources. I think it was a great miscarriage of justice, fines and jail just for twiddling a telephone dial, which a relatively small bit of engineering effort would have stopped, but it does show how the law can deal with things where the net value is so small as to be unmeasurable, in exactly the same way as where millions are involved.

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