Copyrighting trivial code

[ark at alice.UUCP]

In article <2567 at phri.UUCP>, roy at phri.UUCP writes:
> 	The obvious question is whether the copyright notice means
> anything.  Can one really copyright something which is so straightforward,
> trivial, and obvious?  If you gave the assignment "write a C program which
> prints the system page size in decimal to stdout" to 50 programmers, most
> of them would come up with substantially the same program, and many would
> probably be identical, character for character, to the 4.3 version.  If the
> copyright is valid, then any program I write which has that line of code,
> or a similar line of code, in it would be a derivitive work.  Clearly this
> is absurd.

It sure is, and I don't think that's the law.

As far as I know, copyright only protects copying.  In order to copy
something, you have to see the original and transcribe it in some
way (including changing it).  Thus, for instance, it is impossible
to violate the copyright on something you never saw.

So suppose I come up with something that looks just like this little
program and Berkeley accuses me of copyright infringement?  Essentially,
they have to convince a jury that I saw this program and used it to
base my own version on.  For something that short, it would be a
little hard to prove.