> > Someone else could have a better idea and do it in Perl: :-) > > > > #!/usr/bin/perl > > print "Hello World\n"; > > So I write this. Someone else coincidentally writes the same program. Is > there a copyright equivalent of the patent definition of "in the public > domain already"? >
I think, IIRC, copyright is diffrent to patents in this. Each author has a right to his individual work, so both programmers have copyright on their own version of the program, this only works of cause if both can show that the came up with the program indipendently. This is what alows AMD to reverse enginear Intel chips and place a copyright on there chip. John Imrie
