Reddit mentions of Copyright Law in a Nutshell

See section 102(b) of the US Copyright Law:
>(b) In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work.

The textbook I'm using this semester calls this the "Idea/Expression Dichotomy" and summarizes it like this:

>This principle is derived from the Supreme Court's decision in Baker v. Selden, 101 U.S. (11 Otto) 99 (1879), which held that, under copyright law, the copyright owner of a book explaining a system of accounting could prohibit others from copying the original expression containted in the book, but could not prohibit them from copying the accounting system itself. See also Mazer V. Stein, 347 U.S. 201, 217 (1954) ("Unlike a ptent, a copyright gives no exclusive right to the art disclosed; protection is given only to the expression of the idea--not the idea itself").