Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening.
As long as we're not required to register copyright there's no reason to think the above will play out. International copyright agreements are not limited to verbatim copies only.
> Why stop there? Extrapolate that thought, keep generating more variants of the code, claim copyright, and seek rent from other people doing the same thing. To extrapolate full circle, there would be a business opportunity to generate as many variants as possible for the original author, to prevent all this from happening.
This has already been done[1] in music, though in their case they released them to the public domain. Admittedly I think that was more of a protest than anything.
As long as we're not required to register copyright there's no reason to think the above will play out. International copyright agreements are not limited to verbatim copies only.