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But isn't it literally impossible to determine whether I copied those 5 lines or wrote them myself?

Especially in languages like Go where there's an Official Formatter that makes all code look identical as much as possible?

There are a multitude of reasons why I'm not a lawyer and vague crap like this is a big part :D



It’s literally impossible to prove anything outside of a formal system.

Courts would look at the preponderance of the evidence in a civil trial.

Did you have access to my code? Is the copy long enough that it’s statistically very unlikely that could have came up with it exactly on your own?

They’ll look at things like did you copy misspellings in variable names. Did you copy the missing period at the end of the output string etc…




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