gbranden pushed a commit to branch master
in repository groff.
commit adc9d73eafd9fc4dddcf355b2c50d5e82f117ceb
Author: G. Branden Robinson <[email protected]>
AuthorDate: Sun Aug 16 15:21:11 2026 -0500
HACKING: Expand primer on copyright.
---
HACKING | 15 +++++++++++++++
1 file changed, 15 insertions(+)
diff --git a/HACKING b/HACKING
index 50841d592..47d69a4e1 100644
--- a/HACKING
+++ b/HACKING
@@ -214,6 +214,21 @@ Background
overstating the recency of their efforts is, in the lay opinion of the
maintainer as of this writing, neglectful of responsibility.
+* The volume of original expression, not of raw content, establishes a
+ basis for copyright. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected the so-called
+ "sweat of the brow doctrine" in _Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural
+ Telephone Service Co._, 499 U.S. 340 (1991). Even if a statute or
+ case law were to declare a minimum quantum of copyright-eligible
+ content in terms of Shannon entropy, the law would still mandate an
+ analysis of that content's level of creativity, a test it could fail.
+ A perfectly random bit stream can rapidly exceed the information
+ content of a human-crafted haiku, but copyright adjudicators are more
+ likely to locate creativity in the haiku than the bit stream, which
+ could be the product of thermodynamic noise. Organizations like the
+ FSF establish thresholds like "15 lines changed" to ease their own
+ administrative procedures, but no such criterion is binding upon a
+ court deciding a copyright case.
+
* For a deeper treatment of the subject from a domain expert, please see
Jessica D. Litman's monograph, _Digital Copyright_, freely available
on the Web at <https://repository.law.umich.edu/books/1/>.
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