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| Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, April 26 2012 @ 12:38 AM EDT |
But you can express it in a tangible form, by writing it down.
Its like a math formula--an intangible, abstract concept, but it can be
written down in various ways.
Copyright only protects expression (not concepts/ideas). And it has tp
have creative elements to it--facts or purely functional stuff is not
protected. And your work has to be fixed in a tangible form for it to be
protected by copyright.
All of which is why APIs have never been considered copyrightable by
anyone in the computer industry for at least the last 50 years.
API: Its an idea, not expression. Its intangible and abstract.
Documentation/specifications can be copyrighted, and source code can be
copyrighted, but not the idea being documented/specified or implemented.
Apache Harmony, and later Google, read Sun's documentation and
specifications carefully to fully understand the concept of each API--for
every package, class and method, they had to know exactly what its
externally-visible behaviour was supposed to be. Then they implemented
their own source code which followed the same API requirements as
Sun's platform, so that their new implementation would be compatible, and
would behave the way Java programmers (and existing and future Java
programs) expected.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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