> >That's not a law. That's a cautionary decision made by those companies or projects to make it more difficult for competitors to argue that code was copied.
> and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.
Yeah, but only to make it easier for them to argue it; the letter of the law doesn't require it. You could argue that "Sure, I read Windows source code once -- but that was years ago and I can't remember shit of it, so anything I wrote now is my own invention." That might be harder to get the court to accept as a fact, but it's not a prima facie legal impossibility.
> and they made those decisions based on the need to be able to argue in court that code was not copied.
Yeah, but only to make it easier for them to argue it; the letter of the law doesn't require it. You could argue that "Sure, I read Windows source code once -- but that was years ago and I can't remember shit of it, so anything I wrote now is my own invention." That might be harder to get the court to accept as a fact, but it's not a prima facie legal impossibility.
Cautionary decision =/= actual law.