47 minutes ago, JulieMaru-chan said:

It does not apply at all to any other part of the binary (what you call "black magic")

I don't really see why not.  For example, the binary is written in the somewhat proprietary PE format and Microsoft potentially own some IP for that. (They may NOT do, in reality, for this specific format. Other formats are owned however).

47 minutes ago, JulieMaru-chan said:

One, copyright only applies to works written by a human.

Yep fair enough.

47 minutes ago, JulieMaru-chan said:

There is nothing creative or novel about the way a compiler assembles machine code

Well, that's not really true. Lots of non-trivial optimisations happen at that stage and there could be plenty of potentially patentable aspects to that. Whether Microsoft really own any of that IP is another thing entirely though.

37 minutes ago, dmatter said:

For example, the binary is written in the somewhat proprietary PE format and Microsoft potentially own some IP for that.

That has nothing to do with copyright. Formats are not copyrightable.

They're patentable, but if there are patents involved (and I would caution that you should never, never look for patents on anything even remotely related to software, let alone learn about them, because it can only do harm to you; look up the documentary "Patent Absurdity" on YouTube for more info on that sort of thing), then Microsoft isn't suing anyone for it and certainly wouldn't want to. After all, Microsoft presumably wants people to compile software for their operating system.

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Lots of non-trivial optimisations happen at that stage and there could be plenty of potentially patentable aspects to that.

Patents can apply to just about anything, and they apply to generic ideas, not specific programs. The patent system is utterly broken, at least in the field of software. Again, "Patent Absurdity". But that has nothing to do with copyright, or MSVC for that matter.

7 minutes ago, JulieMaru-chan said:

That has nothing to do with copyright. Formats are not copyrightable.

They're patentable...

Right. But I only said Microsoft may own some Intellectual Property there ("IP" is broader than just copyright and includes patents).

My earlier post is simply saying that owning copyright over the original work does not grant you complete and total rights over the resulting generated artifact. It's not that simple. The nature and extent of your 'ownership' and freedom of use are still potentially limited or diluted.

There's a lot of possible examples, but here are some...

• The licensing can restrict various uses (e.g. not for commercial use).
• The storage format may be closed/proprietary (e.g. the DWG AutoCAD format) and consequently could even be subject to further restrictions that you will have agreed to along the way such as disallowing you from reverse-engineering it.
• The resulting file may be an explicit composite of multiple works. Such as if you statically link 3rd party libs into an executable.
• The tool may imbue additional IP automatically. e.g. if MSVC always statically links a certain amount of Microsoft-owned boilerplate. Or that various media-editing tools will overlay a trademarked watermark logo until you pay them.

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I only said Microsoft may own some Intellectual Property there ("IP" is broader than just copyright and includes patents).

This thread is about copyright. There is no reason at all to muddy the issue with talk about patents, which have nothing to do with copyright.

"Intellectual Property" is a useless concept. Copyright, patents, trademarks, trade secrets, etc are all fundamentally different. They need to be treated as separate issues. Please do not conflate them.

You are also conflating copyright and patents with "property", a common mistake. They are not "property". Copyright is a monopoly on the copying and distribution of a work; a patent is a monopoly on the use of an idea; and a trademark is a monopoly on the use of a name or branding. With patents in particular, it's absurd to say that you "own" something because it makes use of an idea that you patented. Say, for example, you had a patent on the idea of typing a password into a pop-up window. That wouldn't mean that you "own" gksudo, a simple program that does that on some GNU/Linux systems. At the most, you could colloquially say that you "own" the idea (meaning that you own the patent on the idea). That's very different.

But again, this is completely unrelated to this topic and to copyright.

If there were a patent on some part of the way MSVC compiles a program, then:

1. The patent wouldn't necessarily be held by Microsoft.
2. MSVC wouldn't necessarily be the only affected compiler.
3. You wouldn't want to know about it, because if you do, you become substantially more liable for patent infringement if you, you know, compile a program you wrote, without the permission of whatever troll holds that patent.

So except as a minefield we all have to blindly walk through in the hopes that we don't get hurt, patents are irrelevant. You're probably going to be in violation of patents no matter what you do, because there are simply too many of them and they are simply too broad. (Again, see "Patent Absurdity". You can find it for free on YouTube.) Ignoring them and hoping for the best is all we can do, so the possibility (or rather, high likelihood) of patents existing should not affect anything that you do.

In short: patents are irrelevant to this topic. Only copyright is relevant here.