Looking for a way to get closer to ‘functional’ protection for copyrightable subject matter? What about getting such protection for software code – copyright lasts for a lot longer than patents do, and in some cases you may be able to make it last forever.
So – how about when you have your final source code ready to use in your next software product, also creating / refactoring / generating a whole lot of (all?) logical variations of key parts of the code and publishing them (and registering them in countries where you can register copyright)? (Creating / refactoring can be done automatically by a computer.)
The point being that now anyone who wants to use similar code has a much higher hurdle to overcome in order to prove that they did not copy. This fact alone will be quite valuable in many situations.
What do you think?