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API Holdup | 245 comments | Create New Account
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API Holdup
Authored by: macliam on Thursday, May 16 2013 @ 05:24 PM EDT

I suggest that the following scenario would be only too plausible were it possible to copyright APIs...


Zorcobi Technologies offers a development environment which includes a virtual machine that can run programs written in an object-oriented language called Papua. Associated with this language is a standard API that can be used to interact with relational databases.

John Doe develops a suite of applications written in Papua which interacts extensively with a commercial database, and uses the Papua standard API to do so. Therefore the source code of John Doe's classes must use the data types and method calls required by the signatures of the methods in the Papua standard API. Moreover John Doe's classes must either catch all exceptions thrown by Zorcobi's Papua Classes, or else must throw them, and declare that they do so. The development of John Doe's application suite represents a significant investment.

John Doe's colleague, Richard Roe, is developing a database management system, and the company wishes to make use of John Doe's application suite in conjunction with both Richard Roe's database management system, and also with Zorcobi's development environment, which can interact with most standard commercial databases. Therefore Richard Roe develops classes in Papua to enable interactions with the database. But because these classes must interoperate with John Doe's application suite, Richard Roe needs to reproduce the structure and method signatures of Zircobi's Papua API. Thus, although both John Doe's software and Richard Roe's software are being developed by the company that employs them both, they interact using a substantial portion of Zorcobi's API.

If Zorcobi's API were copyrightable, then Zorcobi Technologies might well demand licensing fees and place onerous licensing conditions on the company that employs both John Doe and Richard Roe. Zorcobi Technologies might in particular refuse the use of the API unless the entire standard Papua API were implemented by the company. Moreover the API might well include classes and methods that could not be implemented without licensing a number of patents. And, quite possibly, Zorcobi Technologies might own quite a number of those patents...

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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