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Comment by mpoteat | Hacker News Reader

If this lawsuit succeeds, I have a startup idea that I think would be effective.

Create a for-profit copyright registry for code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection. You can be the canonical owner of the copyright for a given piece of code! For a premium fee, we can generate and submit a patent on your behalf as well.

Once I have a large corpus (perhaps millions of entries of code, most one or two lines long), I can automatically scan new respositories and send cease and desist letters for violating my client's copyright. Even if a piece of code is very common, that doesn't mean its unoriginal, it just means that there are many people violating its copyright after all. According to the logic of the folks in this thread at least.

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Do note that there’s the concept of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality, which may be substantial for mere code snippets.

This may be one of the reasons why the lawsuit isn’t based on copyright.

This is the code of the future to ensure your code remains original: https://twitter.com/TylerGlaiel/status/1611115741809627139

Copyright grants an author of a copyrightable work the exclusive right to make more copies of it. However, if people independently come up with the same exact thing, copying has not occurred and that exclusive right was not violated (and then the court battle effectively becomes one about proving whether copying did in fact occur).

In copyright law there is no such concept as "code snippets that are long enough to qualify for copyright protection" or "canonical owners". Quite explicitly, copyright does not give a monopoly over an idea, but merely protects against the unlawful reproduction of an original work.

If you take some snippet from a work in which you own copyright and find that in the world multiple people have somehow managed to write the exact snippet, but they did it independently without copying it from you, then copyright law effectively states the following things:

1) They definitely aren't violating your copyright, and you have no claim on them whatsoever - independent creation is a complete defense to copyright infringement;

2) Perhaps this snippet might be judged uncopyrightable, as the existence of multiple independent recreations is some evidence that it lacks originality and thus would not qualify for copyright protection at all.

You don't need to prove anything in court to send someone a cease and desist. It's often cheaper to settle.

There does exist the concept of 'originality' in copyright law, which I was erroneously conflating with length.

Length does come into play. Copyright is about creativity. If there is no creativity there is no copyright. A code snippet that is too short probably doesn't have enough creativity for it to be copyrightable. If you wrote some code and then registered it so it has a date. It will be difficult for someone who wrote the exact same code, later, to prove it wasn't copied.

If the code snippets are so "obvious" that many people solve the problem axactly the same way, your going to have a lot of trouble asserting a copyright or patent over it.

But your idea is pretty much what almost all manufacturers do, and have been doing for decades.

Automated code scanning working on similar principles is already in use in many large tech companies, but in reverse. Basically, to prevent shipping improperly licensed code, missing attribution notices etc.

Oh, the internet!

Just yesterday, I bought a nice domain name for an idea that's very close to what you mention, monetize on snippets of code.

If you want to team up, hit me up!

That sounds like leftpad but with more steps.

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