And that loud buzzing noise is the jury asking themselves,
if you
had an API license why would you bother with a
cleanroom?
The API
is not at all the same thing as the implementation of the API. A clean room
implementation allows you to get around licensing the implementation code
because that is what you are creating on your own. In a larger sense I agree
with you that if APIs can be protected by copyright then clean room
implementations are nearly worthless and this meaning of "clean room" would not
have become standard nomenclature.
A clean room is typically used when you
want to re-implement an API that is currently being used by a competitor. The
competitor would prefer that no one else implemement the API because that would
give them a de facto monopoly. That's why you have to re-implement it. But if
the competitor doesn't want you to re-implement then they are not going to give
you a license for the API.
That's why this big court battle about the
copyright of APIs seems silly and stupid from my perspective. The concept and
use of clean room implementations go back at least to the 1980's. Has the
entire software industry been deluded for decades? I don't think so. Even
Oracle admits that up until 1996 APIs could not be copyrighted. They claim the
legal landscape has changed since then but I have not seen a single iota of
proof to back up this incredible claim.
---
Our job is to remind
ourselves that there are more contexts than the one we’re in now — the one that
we think is reality.
-- Alan Kay [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
| 
