Can you alter the MIT license?

[Scott Johnston]

>How far can you go with this notion that you cannot copyright a fact? Can you
>copyright the arrangement of chess men on a chess board? (In other words, can 
>you copyright a chess problem?) 
>
>If you cannot copyright that, then how can you copyright the arrangement of 
>letters on a page? There is a large but finite number of combinations in 
>both cases, so what would the difference be?

It's not that you can't copyright factual information, it's that there is a
fair use exception to the copyright law for those "expressions of an idea"
that are nothing more than a compilation of facts, like the white pages of a
phone book.

I sometimes use when talking about fair-use of patches to open source code,
when the patch contains nothing more than fixes done to bugs in the the
obvious way.

Scott Johnston