On Jul 21, 2004, at 09:26, Brian Thomas Sniffen wrote:
But the human who expresses a beautiful and elegant idea of loops *does* have a copyright on that, even if he writes it into a program to produce customized loops.
Not likely. The type of loops generated by a compiler are not really creative. They are, to start with, maybe 10 different sane ways of doing a loop in assembly, if even that. Those different sane ways are used by every assembly language programmer, every compiler writer, etc.
The choice between those different sane ways is, in any sane compiler, driven by one of two technical --- not creative --- requirements; either speed or code size.
Even if there is a creative element, I think it'd fail the merger doctrine.
Also, look at the alternative. Why wouldn't things like Gimp's (or Photoshop's) image filters count, too? Those are certainly at least as creative as a loop.
[It may be possible to write a compiler which would use a copyrightable form of a for loop. However, it'd be a silly compiler, because it'd produce slow, bloated executables.]
