You are right, difficulty is not necessary and sufficient for copyright
protection. Some of your examples could be protected. ("I love you" in arranged
atoms looks like expression in tangible form to this layman. You would not own
the phrase I love you, but your arrangement would be infringed if someone
published their atomic I love you by copying your specific
arrangement.)
One
could look at an api as a listing of facts: within a
compatible runtime, provide
this parameter to a method with this name and you
will get a an object of a
certain type in return. (Look further to understand
the side effects...)
Programmers look up the facts of access and returns all
the time and it would
be absurd for the authors of a programming language to
claim rights to all
binaries and scripts which use the language they
designed. But, let's
think of collections of facts, for instance, an
almanac, a dictionary, the Guiness
Book of World Records. While each individual
fact is not protected, the entirety
of a chapter or the whole publication
could be. The Information Please people
were
not entitled to just typeset the
World Almanac, because each element was
factual, and in fact represented
collection rather than authorship.
And the rationale has been that a
non-trivial amount of work took place to
create the collection. So we
come back to the question:
are apis protected expression? The argument no is
that an api is still just a fact.
The argument yes is that an api listing,
because of the work involved, becomes a dictionary-like publication and has
protection for significant sections, even though every entry is documentation
of
a public domain langauge. For this argument, think of the api documentation
for a java package as a dictionary's chapter for the letter K. Bottom
line: open question. There is no obvious answer, otherwise we would not be
having a trial on the issue. As I think about, I hope apis
are not
protected.
I consider us all beneficiaries for the unix apis being widely
broadcast. If
there was a way to acquire rights which could form the basis for
suing
deep-pocketed Apple over the unix apis in OS X, there'd be someone to
jump up
and buy those rights from Novell's successor.
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