Oracle's 'APIs are copyrightable' defense = nightmare for programmers

[rwolf]

It is painful to watch the guys at itworld go into a spiel about APIs, only to realize the intern they asked to look this up thinks they were talking about web APIs like Twitter.

Sheesh.

[_delirium]

In terms of scope I can agree that there is a bit of a difference, in that we're talking about whether you can copyright an entire library design versus a specific limited set of interconnection points. But even that would be problematic and contrary to existing practice; for example, Wine's reimplementation of the Win32 API would be a copyright violation if the Win32 API (and not just the code implementing it) is copyrightable. It contradicts the assumptions behind clean-room reverse engineering as well, which are that how-something-works documentation doesn't taint copyright of a new implementation that follows it as a spec.

[JamieEi]

I'm not an intern, and I don't understand why web vs. local makes a difference in this case. Can you explain?

[timf]

I found this to be a better treatment of the subject: http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/08/oracle-defends-copyr...

[extension]

According to that, nearly all of Oracle's arguments boil down to "the Java API is a beautiful and unique snowflake, therefor it should be copyrightable". It may very well be beautiful and unique, but are they really suggesting that Google cloned Java merely because they didn't want to take the time to come up with their own API and not because they wanted to interoperate with existing Java code and tools? Oracle points out that Google's Java is not 100% compatible, but so what? It's still compatible with a large subset of Java, and a large subset of tools and libraries do, in fact, work with Android unmodified.

Is there not some aspect of copyright law that prevents these sorts of doomsday abuse scenarios e.g. someone copyrights the sound of breathing and we all choke to death? It seems to me that the extreme collatoral damage that would be caused by copyrightable APIs is, in itself, a silver bullet argument against it.

[joe_the_user]

Ah, you mean Oracle shill Florian Mueller?

Our "professional corporate communicator" certainly spends a lot of effort looking at these cases but his role in publicizing a a variety of bogus claims such as the various "Android violates the GPL" efforts inclines me to count my fingers and neurons after I read his blog.

[sutro]

So I guess Oracle owes IBM a lot of money for its use of SQL through the years.

[Turing_Machine]

Indeed, and since this is a copyright rather than a patent IBM could presumably still assert it. For that matter, if this is upheld it seems as though IBM could go after all the makers of IBM-compatible BIOS chips through the years -- the situation seems virtually identical, right down to the clean-room reimplementation.

Careful with that blunt legal instrument, Larry...

[Doug-W]

Time to register my copyright on int main( int argc, const char* argv[] );

[floppydisk]

Copyrighting return might have a good ROI as well!

[7952]

How exactly do you even define an API in real world terms? You can't see it, touch it, smell it, or hear it. If you can copyright an internal API, you can copyright anything.

[groovy2shoes]

It's very possible to be able to see some representation of an API. They'd be virtually useless if you couldn't. The reason APIs aren't copyrightable is that such a copyright would defeat the entire purpose of an API: interoperability between bits of software.

[ansy]

To me copyrights for APIs should be treated the same as for recipes and games. You can't copyright the list of ingredients or design, respectively, but you can copyright any text or images that goes with it. In the case of an API, the specific documentation such as JavaDocs would be copyrighted.