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| I specifically meant the following scenario:
|
| You are glancing through another company?s manual.
| You read the following sentence:
|
| Our Company is interested in the applications
| you develop with our products, and we want to
| help if you have problems with them.
|
| It?s a nicely written sentence, says everything it
| needs to, and you were just about to work on the
| Customer Support section of your manual.
| Can you/would you use this sentence? Is there a
| legal element to copyright and a moral one for
| plagiarize? Would either of these obligate us
| to twist and turn it around so it's our own creation,
| even if that means it's not as pleasing a sentence?
How long would it take to write an original sentence that expresses this? 30
seconds? 2 minutes? Much less time than has been devoted to this thread, I
suspect.
In any case, yes, intentional verbatim copying from another company's
documentation is clearly out-of-bounds. I can't imagine any company would
litigate over one sentence (especially the one given in the example!), but
you cannot legally or ethically copy writing from another company's
documentation.
