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Originally Posted by Baler
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Props to you loramin for being A+ helpful in this community. I sincerely hope OP reads what you wrote.
To add to this,. it's not legal if you re-write what someone else did without their consent and claim it as your own. It's only legal if you write the same code having never seen the original code to begin with and are able to prove this in a court of law. Which is not easy to prove. Of course this varies country to country I'm primarily speak about usa law.
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While this is true, I should point out that in practice it's very difficult to prove that a rewrite was a literal rewrite of someone else's code, and not just the same problem being solved a similar way. It's the kind of thing you need Google's law department to really go after, and even then you wouldn't do it except in the most extreme circumstances.
If you look at Uber vs. Google Uber literally stole a higher-up in Google's auto division AND he took code on a USB stick or something when he left, AND Google could prove all that. I'm no lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that if Google had't had such a strong case they wouldn't even have gone to court with Uber.
In other words, as unfair as it may be, many companies can get away with rewriting code. In practice though doing that tends to be as much work as writing fresh code, so I don't think it's a major problem for the industry.