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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, May 30 2012 @ 08:45 PM EDT

But the authors of the PlayStation games did program with the Sony BIOS APIs.
And their programs were then converted into a binary format suitable for
execution -- but the APIs were still embodied in that program.

When you write source code, that's expression, and it's eligible for copyright
protection. When compiled into machine code, the expression is still there, it
just had a mechanical transformation applied to it. That's why anything from
the source code which was protected by copyright, is also protected by copyright
in the compiled version of the code.

It's also why if the source code of a PlayStation game uses the Sony BIOS APIs,
then the compiled game also uses those APIs (I would argue that this is true
both conceptually, and literally).

But I now feel like I'm making a big deal out of minor details. I do agree with
most of what you have posted on the topic of API and ABI.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

...reminds me of the time - Authored by: Anonomous on Thursday, May 31 2012 @ 12:33 AM EDT

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