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Authored by: Ian Al on Tuesday, September 11 2012 @ 04:57 AM EDT |
By law, copyright protection only applies to creative expression fixed in a
medium.
It would be possible to copyright protect a document that creatively expressed
an API as long as the document includes original creative expression and is not
automatically generated in its entirety from other content (aka an autodoc
process).
Judge Alsup explained that, by law, the protection did not extend to the ideas
expressed in the document such as functional definitions nor to names and short
phrases in an APA. (Works of fiction may be a special case when it comes to
proper names as creative expression.)
The answer to your question is that it is possible to protect an API
specification document, but not the API ideas expressed within it. The Oracle v.
Google case seems to have eliminated even the most convoluted arguments about
the API being creative expression in the form of the organisation of the
individual components.
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Regards
Ian Al
Software Patents: It's the disclosed functions in the patent, stupid![ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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