Jason Potkanski wrote:
Copyright in the US seems rather clear. Copyright is designed to protect ideas and to a limited extent the expression of those ideas.
That's not correct. It protects the expression but not the ideas at all. (In some cases the idea may be protected by patents.) When the information becomes so intertwined with the expression that the two cannot be separated it can render the expression uncopyrightable. This is the merger principle. It was the basis for Lexmark's court loss to Static Control Corp., when it claimed that copying a handshake program was a copyvio.
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