I confirm what Karen said: the scanning software automatically flagged your contribution.
These guys https://www.safe-corp.com/ are the most common vendor of scanning software by IP firms. I've been at clients where we used them in the past. As they say at https://www.safe-corp.com/company_process.htm, correlations flagged by the software do not imply infringement. One of the very specific points they make is that unauthorised copying is plagiarism, but authorising copying is not. Hence the importance of attribution so authorisation can be easily traced if needed by some end user.
I do not agree with your approach to check the IP of a function piece by piece and saying as each piece is not covered by IP, the assembly of all pieces is also not covered by IP. If you compare to a patented hardware for example, it is probable that each individual piece is not covered by any IP or patent, but the assembly of all pieces make something original and provide a new feature which can be patented.
Patents protect ideas and processes. Copyright protects the *expression* of facts and ideas. Not the ideas nor facts themselves. Not the processes. You are conflating the two. The AFC test I mentioned is very widely used around the world by legal systems when dealing with copyright of software in particular. The only major jurisdiction which doesn't use it is the United Kingdom as far as I know. Small code snippets are very often the *only* way of doing something *efficiently* (the efficiency point is very important and unique to software copyright consideration). Hence two skilled engineers would be highly likely to write the same piece of code in the same circumstances. In this situation no copyright infringement can occur. (Most interestingly, if the original source stuck in a pointless inefficient piece of code in the middle, now copyright infringement *would* apply because now there is unique expression that would not be reasonably introduced by a different skilled programmer working independently. On this point many a copyright infringing startup has fallen)
What lawyers explained me is that there is a risk, when there is a risk the decision could be lawyers against lawyers, and companies do not like such risks.
All open source code is full of such risks, and a company is absolutely right to perform a scan for IP problems before using it. I've been at multinationals before where we were given a list of legally flagged problem sections in an open source library which had to be rewritten before we could use that library. Ideally, the company should really send those rewrites back to the open source library as a PR. But they never seem to do so :(. They ought to do so in thanks for the software. Niall -- ned Productions Limited Consulting http://www.nedproductions.biz/ http://ie.linkedin.com/in/nialldouglas/