Apparently so much is standard boilerplate that is cut and pasted that proving a specific contract is an outright copy is hard.

That's actually a good way of putting the point I was getting at WRT code. Anyone who's been doing this for any length of time has seen a half-dozen sort implementations. When writing a program that includes a sort, how can you properly attribute the originality of the idea? This was why I suggested that the whole issue brings up the larger question of whether copyright can even properly be applied to software.