I suppose it makes sense from the perspective of copyright law, which protects artifacts. After all, one could say the same for quoting from a famous literary work .."ha now they're valuing literature in terms of number of words of prose!"
The dissent clearly highlights the fallacy of the ruling, where it discussed the importance of the "heart" of the work, rather than the portion of exact lines copied.
Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.
>Aka, that you could clone Harry Potter's plot, characters, and story while not copying each word of the book verbatim, and it still be a copy of Harry Potter.
Would that be a copyright infringement? Probably just trademark infringement at that point?
Copyright attaches to the actual text (illustrations, etc; whatever is “fixed in a tangible form”), not the ideas.
You could write a story about a boy of humble origins who is whisked off to a special school, discovers he’s special, and fights evil. There aren’t that many original plots, after all....
You’ll only get into trouble if the main character is called Harry Potter of 10 Privett Drive, where he resides with his mother’s sister and her awful family, and he later attends Hogwarts, etc.
Copyright covers derivative works. If a story is plainly the same with names changed, the original copyright extends to it. This can be applied to the point of absurdity in music copyrights.
The derivative work has to be literally derived from the original "such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted." (per 17 USC 101). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101
The merger and scenes a faire doctrine permit lots of overlap in terms of themes, tropes and set dressing. You could certainly write a coming-of-age story set in a magical boarding school; indeed, Harry Potter is neither the first nor the last such novel. One of the classic cases is Walker v. Time Life. The two works, which were found to be non-infringing, both start with a double murder of two cops (one Black, one white) in the South Bronx, both feature demoralized Irish-American cops, and both have similar tropes (rats, cop-talk, etc). A reviewer might reasonably describe it as derivative (and a few did, I think), but not legally so.
What you probably couldn't do is publish the (non-parodic) story of Perry Hotter and his substantially-similar adventures at Pigworts, though that's also absolutely spoiling for a trademark fight.
Music gets weird because it a) seems like there are a lot of possible note sequences but b) there aren't really.
It’s generally not trademark infringement to refer to the actual thing the trademark refers to (”nominative use”).
This would actually be a claim unlikely to succeed unless you are intentionally claiming that are writing the true original Harry Potter stories.
To use your Harry Potter comparison, it would be like asserting that Magic Boy Adventures violates Harry Potter's copyright because one of the characters in MBA was similar to the Neville Longbottom.
Or in other words, a tiny fraction of the original work would essentially be allowed to monopolize the entire space of works involving magical kids going to school.
(And this is why Justice Thomas is widely regarded as the least competent justice of at least the past half century.)
Incorrect, because as Justice Thomas states, the "heart" of the work being copied is at issue, not a given percentage. Neville Longbottom is obviously not the "heart" of what a Harry Potter book is.
Presumably the issue would be if one wrote a book substantially about the same character as Harry Potter who went through the same plot events in significant detail, but only 0.4% of the sentences were identical and the main character's name was Barry.
Incorrect, because the "heart" of the work is not being copied, and therefore, the entirety of Justice Thomas' dissenting opinion is just pointless blathering.
Thomas would allow copyright on code regardless of any creativity. This would destroy the software industry. Anyone who is first in time would monopolize entire swaths of software functionality.
And that is what he wants. Thomas is an ideologue, and his sole goal in allowing the copyrighting of code is to destroy the tech industry, which he views as hostile to Republicans. You can see it in the logic of his dissent, which would require the court to override decades of settled case law all supporting the proposition that code and other functional expression. In order to justify his nonsensical arguments, Thomas is forced to come up with an entirely new category of code that is not supported by legislative history or judicial history. Thomas' only justification for this category is...that it's "not fair" to a multi-billion dollar company that the non-copyrightable portions of their code were copied by another corporation. Pity the poor multi-billion dollar corporation, they just can't ever get a break.
Even he notes that his dissent is nonsensical when he admits "declaring code is 'inherently bound together with uncopyrightable ideas.'
Now? I've personally heard quantities of code measured in "lines of code" (or, thousands of lines of code-- "K-LOCs") going back to the mid-90's. An acquaintance who worked for IBM in the 70's said it dates back at least that far (measuring developer productivity in the "K-LOCs" they produce).
It's been going on since the 1960s (maybe longer).
Personally, I think the best code is the code I don't write.
A significant part of my refactoring, is removing as much code as possible, by tweaking algorithms, deriving common base classes, and removing unused code branches.
Every line of code is a potential bug. The less code, the less bugs.
It may be a poor metric, but it's not like we have any other metrics to measure code by.
Well, "dollars / year", if you work in an industry where you can directly A-B test against revenue, but I think most of us are happiest not knowing whether our particular lines of code are EV-positive.
we absolutely have other metrics. Features, Stories, Ease-of-use, Dev Friendly, Qualitive Value. LoC is simply broadcasting how complex either A) the problem is (fair) or B) how you've made it (not fair) - most fall into the latter camp.
Code bases like kubernetes come to mind for LoC far exceeding its value. Code bases like Quake3 come to mind for LoC that provide tremendous value. Every line is an explicit decision to improve the code or make it worse.
Refactoring a system to be generic and re-usable, for example, would reduce LoC yet provide tremendous value. If I were her manager, would I deduct points for -2000 LoC? Would I praise her for taking copy-pasta and making a pattern? I know which I'd choose.
Number of lines is actually a pretty good (though imperfect) measure of how difficult a code base is to work with, which is why many developers are delighted by the opportunity to delete code.
