That was the jury's verdict in the first case. The judge overrode that in a ruling which can be read at http://www.groklaw.net/pdf3/OraGoogle-1202.pdf. In that he lays out the many cases where copyright cannot be infringed on a snippet, and the importance of originality as far as copyright is concerned.
The judge most certainly did not override the jury on the rangeCheck issue.
And that opinion you cite - dealing with the copyrightability of APIs - is overturned on appeal.
The Appeal was to overturn the judge's original overriding of the jury's decision, and to put things back to the haphazard way the jury found them. The judge's original verdict text which I linked to is the main contribution to case law and precedent. He is one of America's leading experts on computer IP law, indeed I believe he programs himself. His summary text will be used in all legal arguments relating to computer IP going forth. The fact his judgment was overturned etc is relatively unimportant, as it related to how he implemented legal process, not his legal arguments in summarising the case. Anyway, as interesting as all this is, this is why Boost is part of the Software Freedom Conservancy who employ lawyers specifically for questions of this nature. The only reason that my specific use of SO snippets was noticed is because I added a comment regarding them. All other use of SO snippets are by definition uncommented, and are not being noticed. That makes them far more dangerous and pernicious if my understanding of copyright law is wrong. If Boost feels that this is a problem, the SFC lawyers should be asked and on the basis of their advice, the page at http://www.boost.org/development/requirements.html should be updated to specifically give advice on the use of small, non-standalone code snippets such as from StackOverflow. A commercial program which identifies code snippets borrowed from the internet should be employed to scan the Boost source code, and all infringements fixed. I throw the problem back to you, boost-steering. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/