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APIs and copyrights | 270 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Sorry
Authored by: Ian Al on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 12:03 PM EDT
I agree that the design of an API, taken as a whole, is creative enough that it should be subject to copyright.
The law says that 'sweat of the brow', ideas and concepts are not protectable. Only creative expression fixed in a medium might be protectable.

---
Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid!

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

APIs and copyrights
Authored by: scav on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 12:26 PM EDT
There are other tests than creativity. If an API is an
abstract idea or system or means of operation, then it's not
copyrightable anyway. Doesn't matter how creative it was.

If it's written down, the API specification document is
copyrightable. But the copyright protects that *document*
from being copied, and does not prevent its use *as a
specification* to create software that conforms to it.

In other words, the document itself is fixed in tangible
form, but the *facts* it contains (such as "there exists a
class called Whatever with the following methods...") are
not copyrightable material, because they are just facts
about how the class libraries work, and it doesn't make
sense to talk about copying facts. How do you tell how many
copies of a fact exist? How would you destroy all copies of
a fact?

Even if you strain really hard to give them the benefit of
the doubt and be even-handed, it will be impossible to
reconcile Oracle's position with reality.


---
The emperor, undaunted by overwhelming evidence that he had no clothes,
redoubled his siege of Antarctica to extort tribute from the penguins.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

API's and copyrights
Authored by: tknarr on Friday, April 20 2012 @ 01:44 PM EDT

I don't think creativity is a factor here. It's a lot of work to come up with a plot for a book. The plot's certainly creative. But you cannot copyright the plot. How much work it took, how creative it is, those don't matter because a plot isn't protected by copyright. Your book using that plot, when you write it, will be covered. But the plot itself is an abstract concept, a framework you'll follow when creating your work, and as such is outside the bounds of what's copyrightable at all. And yes, that means that some other author can come along and write a different book using your plot. Which is, and has always been, perfectly fine.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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