Software Copyright Law
The cluster discusses the scope of copyright protection for software, emphasizing that it covers literal source code expression but not ideas, algorithms, APIs, or functionality, while distinguishing from patents and clean-room reimplementation.
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Access to code doesnt negate copyright law.
Copyright is the exclusive right to a particular creative expression, traditionally text. If you recreate the same functionality as another program without copying its text, there is no copyright violation. There may be patent infringement, but that's another matter.
What you want and what the law allows may be two different things. Ideas are not subject to copyright. Specific implementations might be.
No, copyright only applies to the actual text of the code. Ideas and algorithms are not copyrightable.
Source code is already copyrightable and this doesn't seem to be an issue.
You can only copyright the text of the source code, as if it was literature. Write your own source code to implement the same algorithm using the same efficient techniques, and you're fine (as long as it isn't patented.)
the problem is you can't launder copyrighted code with this because you don't see the copyrighted code in the first place.
It is not a copyright issue unless you typed out the exact code from memory. It could be a patent issue if it behaves the same way.
It's for a court of law to decide. GP was merely stating (what sounds like a fairly accurate) description of how copyright on code currently works in most jurisdictions.
Do you have some more details how it would be copyright infringing? I can't see what part of an implementation would be direct copied work, unless it's byte sequences etc.