I think the argument now is that the wording itself
warrants
protection, as
even if the idea is not copyrightable, the
expression of the idea in words, and
most specifically the
choice of words, is.
In recipes, though, whether you
"sear" meat or "fry" it
or "sauté" the onions is really the choice of a precise
set
of steps so that they will not be understood. It's very
different from one
of Charles Dicken's multi-page
descriptions that could be simply substituted
with "it was
foggy" - but you'd lose the despair if you were that
precise.
(>
Bleak House)
Just look at the explosion of "translations" of the
Bible
in
the 20th century. It has become a game to see how many words
need to
be changed to claim copyright of the text. The ideas
behind the text have been
hashed out and expressed in a
myriad of ways before. Or at least that's the way
copyrights
have been treated in recent years. It's created an industry
of data
duplication.
I'm an open source developer, with several fairly popular
libraries
to my credit. Seeing the numbers of people who use them is
as
addictive as watching "likes" or retweets. Is the code I
write more than
precise instructions to a machine? Not at
all!
In fact, the only thing that
I see as creative in a way
that
I could assert copyright is the naming of
variables and the
comments I write into the code. However, the more
standardized the comments and naming conventions, the less
creativity is
required.
The real "creativity" is in determining what you want the
code to
do and getting the machine to perform. That's 99% of
programming. It can't be
compared to writing a novel, imho. ---
IANAL
Linguist and Open Source Developer [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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