I'm not sure about that. Consider...

Do you know the famous photographer, Ken Rockwell? He is like a Bagginsbill - always reviewing and researching and explaining everything.

One thing he does for every lens is he posts what values to use to compensate for barrel or pincushion distortion - particular values to be used in Photoshop. According to him, arriving at these numbers is not easy, and the fact that he posts the number to use (just one number!) is copyrighted.

For example, on this page

http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/1755.htm

he says this after telling us what number to use to fix this lens's distortion:

Quote - I offer these figures as the results of lengthy research to help you get great results. Use them all you want for your photography, but this research is all copyrighted it is forbidden to make any other use without explicit permission.

According to him, I am forbidden to make any publication where I communicate the particular number +X.Y in conjunction with advising someone how to avoid barrel distortion on a particular lens.

So consider after I experiment for 1000 hours in Poser and I tell you (as I have told you) that 7 is the optimum number of AO samples to use in an AO node. You may use 7 in your work, but you must not publish this number, 7, to anybody else. It is possible that the result of some terribly difficult, expensive, and time consuming research is intellectual property. And nobody would argue if such research led to a copyrighted 100 page document, right? But what if the result of the research (remember, thousands of hours) is just one number, or a few numbers, or 30 numbers? Where do you draw the line?

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Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)