Do you copyright your source code?
-
Q. Do you copyright your source code? It bothers me to have to mail my secret source code to a copyright attorney or U.S. copyright office. I'm not comfortable with anyone seeing all my hard work. Who can you trust? I'm asking because it seems to me very difficult to prove or disprove if my source code is being used, whole or in part, by another program. A software thief would be smart enough to not copy a Windows App in its entirety because it would look identical to the original. However, a small DLL copy or clone and rename would probably pass the public eye unnoticably. I fully understand book copyrighting because the text is public and easily compared to another authors text. Plagiarism much more easily detected and proved or disproved. But software source code is something hidden from public eye. There's no way I could know if someone has cut-n-paste my source code into thiers. On the other hand, I can also understand that copyrighting may be a good 'extra care measure' to protect the 'what if' cases of source code theft. Q. What is your honest opinion about source code copyrights.
-
Q. Do you copyright your source code? It bothers me to have to mail my secret source code to a copyright attorney or U.S. copyright office. I'm not comfortable with anyone seeing all my hard work. Who can you trust? I'm asking because it seems to me very difficult to prove or disprove if my source code is being used, whole or in part, by another program. A software thief would be smart enough to not copy a Windows App in its entirety because it would look identical to the original. However, a small DLL copy or clone and rename would probably pass the public eye unnoticably. I fully understand book copyrighting because the text is public and easily compared to another authors text. Plagiarism much more easily detected and proved or disproved. But software source code is something hidden from public eye. There's no way I could know if someone has cut-n-paste my source code into thiers. On the other hand, I can also understand that copyrighting may be a good 'extra care measure' to protect the 'what if' cases of source code theft. Q. What is your honest opinion about source code copyrights.
As far as I know, anything written or produced by an individual is copyrighted in the United States regardless. The officialness of all of that would be Trademarks and Patents and those must be taken care of through official means. Having said that, I agree that it would be difficult to prove anything along those lines, Im really not sure what to tell you about how to protect everything.
CleaKO
"I think you'll be okay here, they have a thin candy shell. 'Surprised you didn't know that." - Tommy Boy
"Fill it up again! Fill it up again! Once it hits your lips, it's so good!" - Frank the Tank (Old School)