[billybob]

If I had to explain the issue at stake here, I'd do it this way.

Imagine you go into a fast-food restaurant. "I'd like a burger," you say to the cashier. You get a burger. The next day, you go to a different restaurant. "I'd like a taco," you say. They bring you a taco.

Just then, a lawyer bursts in. "I'm sorry, but my client, the burger restaurant, has a copyright on that. No other restaurant is allowed to accept orders in the form of 'I'd like a(n) X'".

Would that be crazy?

APIs are the computer equivalent. If you go to a blog and request a page like 'someblog.com/posts', then you go to a movie theater's site and request a page like 'moviesite.com/movies', you wouldn't think of those two actions as having anything in common. Sure, both sites use a url like '/items' to serve up that kind of item. Why wouldn't they?

But if the courts rule that APIs can be copyrighted, the movie site might either have to license the right to have URLs like '/movies', or do something else.

What else? Whatever they can think of - and think of it first. Because the race will be on to copyright every imaginable scheme. '/show/me/movies' and '/movies=all' and '/3932939' will soon be taken. Even if they can come up with a new convention, they'll likely be in court for the right to use it.

Does that sound good for consumers - ostensibly the ones whom intellectual property laws should benefit? Does it sound good for new businesses who don't have legal departments?

Or would it be crazy?

[sunir]

Except that isn't a good analogy. It's much more like copyrighting the Burger King menu, which is the interface to ordering services from Burger King.

By the way, you can copyright restaurant menus.

[ajross]

By the way: you can only copyright the expression of the menu. You cannot copyright the food. If someone wants to offer a straight up clone of the Whopper(tm), there's nothing Burger King can do (though trademark law would of course prevent them from calling it a "Whopper").

[adnam]

Entirely wrong analogy. The order counter is the interface, and the menu is the documentation.

[billybob]

It depends on what's considered an API, and that would be a question settled by courts. If a judge decides that someone owns RESTful APIs, every Rails app on the planet will infringe that.

Even if you're right, and the copyright applied only to a specific list of API endpoints and actions, it would still be a nightmare for startups. You couldn't release anything without legal vetting.

[smokeyj]

> Except that isn't a good analogy.

Why is that? If an API can be copyrighted why not a protocol?

[noonespecial]

The problem is that there really isn't a good analogy for this. Its not the menu, or the counter. Its more like going up the the counter, reading the menu, placing the order, going into the restaurant, there being a restaurant in the first place, etc. It regresses away from you as fast as you can analogize until you end up at machine code clicked in with binary switches and some nitwit telling you he "owns" the op-codes.

Some ideas in computing are just hard to put into real world analogies. This is one of those ideas. Trying to apply some sort of IP law to it is just a plain bad idea. People who code know this instinctively, people who don't are just going to have to trust the people who do, or switch the damn things off altogether.