Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted 260
An anonymous reader writes: The EFF, representing a coalition of computer scientists, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court yesterday hoping for a ruling that APIs can't be copyrighted. The names backing the brief include Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson, Guido van Rossum, and many other luminaries. "The brief explains that the freedom to re-implement and extend existing APIs has been the key to competition and progress in both hardware and software development. It made possible the emergence and success of many robust industries we now take for granted—for example, mainframes, PCs, and workstations/servers—by ensuring that competitors could challenge established players and advance the state of the art. The litigation began several years ago when Oracle sued Google over its use of Java APIs in the Android OS. Google wrote its own implementation of the Java APIs, but, in order to allow developers to write their own programs for Android, Google's implementation used the same names, organization, and functionality as the Java APIs."
system or method of operation (Score:5, Informative)
"in no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work." -- 17 U.S. Code 102 [cornell.edu]
Baker v. Selden was one of the big rulings on this clause. But it was not consistently applied to newer technology like APIs.
It helps when a judge knows what an API is, the purpose of an API is clear to engineers. To provide an interface for operation of software components. But the courts haven't fulled grasped if that is a method of operation, as above, or is an API a "structure, sequence and organization" which would fall under copyright?
As a software engineer, I've always considered APIs to be a system to allow interoperability of software components. Given the same requirements and same software language and industry practice it's not hard to end up with very similar APIs between independent software teams. It's not an invention, even though there is work involved in designing and writing and testing it. And in cases where software compatibility is the requirement, there is no choice but to use the same interface (computer science might generically call it a contract). If a procedure requires three integers and a returns a float, that's not an invention that's an agreement between software components to permit inter operation.
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It seems that if APIs can be placed under copyright, then all interfaces can be placed under copyright.
AT&T could have copyrighted the telephone interface and prevented people from buying non-AT&T phones to connect to the AT&T network. Laser printer manufacturers could stop coming up with DMCA-based attempts to wipe out toner cloners - just copyright the interface. Automobile manufacturers could wipe out the whole aftermarket parts market - just copyright the interface.
Re:system or method of operation (Score:5, Interesting)
You're confusing interfaces of physical devices that isn't copied by copyright (but perhaps patents) with an expressible form of information that is copyright protected. (like a written work, computer software, song, and others)
If any API can be placed under copyright, it's not because it's an interface, it's because it's software. You can already copyright software, not a big deal there.
That said, I am strongly opposed to expanding the scope of copyright on computer software because I believe protecting APIs would be harmful to the industry that I work in. Potentially costing silicon valley billions in litigation, lost revenue and possibly having a chilling effect on software start-ups in the US. Effectively hobbling American technology industry to the point that innovation must occur outside of the US and be imported. An trade imbalance of innovations and IP could be very harmful to the long term growth of the US, not unlike the current imbalance in manufacturing.
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I don't see the distinction. The physical interface is defined by a drawing, and drawings are as much subject to copyright as the file of structured text that defines an API.
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Prior to 1984, they DID prevent people from connecting non-AT&T phones to their network. That's why stuff like acoustic couplers existed.
Re:system or method of operation (Score:4, Informative)
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I didn't state my position well. I'm trying to make the claim that the API is nothing more than an interface, regardless of which side of the interface one implements. Unless there is something patentable in the structure or operation of the interface (because of invention), or copyrightable in the expression (because of some kind of original expression of ideas) the interface itself shouldn't be/can't be protected by law from use by someone else. In software the notion of "calling" a subroutine might b
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Of course though, according to the Supreme Court of the United States, they who pay the most get the super twisty ruling they want, where the English language is redefined to suit the greed of those interpreting it. Make no mistake, that has become glaringly obvious to most of the just and democratic world which treat the law and justice with far greater respect and do not put a 'PUBLIC' price on the blatant redefining of the language used in the writing of it. Basically those who can afford to push it up
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If a procedure requires three integers and a returns a float, that's not an invention that's an agreement between software components to permit inter operation.
But it only has to exist in order to follow that API. If I create a "Point" class I can have the function "int getX()" or "int getHorizontalPosition()", I can choose many different ways to set parameters and defaults through constructors and member functions and overloads and if you look at the API as a whole the division into classes and the means by which they interact is clearly designed. If you isolated two teams and asked them to design any non-trivial API it is extremely unlikely it'd be exactly the s
Car analogy (Score:2)
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Split this baby down the middle... (Score:2)
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You create what amounts to a function, accessed either by including a library/header/whatever, or perhaps by passing a bunch of particular GET/POST/PUT arguments to a particular URL structure on a webserver. You know if you ask item foo to process bar you will get back fee in some agreed on form. You then make this public knowledge, or at least known to your customers and whoever reads your publicly available documentation. This shouldn't be protected. Anyone should be able to make an item called foo th
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"I'm not a computer scientist, but..." (Score:3)
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public static void main(String[] args) {...} Copyright (c) Orale Corporation. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the copyright owner.
Wouldn't C represent prior art?
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As for APIs, I think the law should allow API re-use when there is no workaround, but not when their isn't
IMHO Copyright sucks but APIs are copyrightable (Score:4, Interesting)
A lot of work goes into creating a good API. Copyright should be greatly reduced or eliminated if we care about human progress, but bad law passed by Congress is still law. The Supreme Court will probably rule against these computer scientists, and that may make things worse than ambiguity. "For a limited time" has already been deemed by the Supreme Court to be effectively equal to infinity minus one in the "Eldred v. Ashcroft" decision instead of the Supreme Court ruling copyright longer than a few years was now defeating "the Progress of Science and useful Arts" which IMHO would have been a better ruling. Given that, what should happen is that either Congress should change the copyright laws or we should change the Constitution and withdraw from various copyright treaties. But that would interfere with the Constitutional right for existing big businesses and long dead authors to make a profit.... Of course, it's also been shown that profit is no motivation for creativity, but that is conveniently ignored in a capitalist society:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... [youtube.com]
See also:
http://www.neurope.eu/article/... [neurope.eu]
"Ignoring these exclusive rights - the copyright monopoly - allowed Eastern Europe to leapfrog 20 years of development. This is a consistent pattern through economic history: it is only the countries that are geopolitically dominant at a particular time that seek to impose their exclusive rights upon others, as a means of kicking away the ladder to the top. When the United States was in its infancy, those who illegally copied science, production plans, and useful arts from Great Britain were proclaimed national heroes. It was only recently - the 1980s - that the United States began aggressively pushing its exclusive rights regime as part of being a superpower, and as an integral means of maintaining that superpower."
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/... [p2pfoundation.net]
""There is an overall culture of sharing knowledge here, even if this isn't called 'Creative Commons'. We had the launch of CCIndia in early 2007, but there seems to be little activity there... I think CC is a bit too conservative and too respectful of copyright issues. Copyright has not worked for us (in the developing world) for generations. Generally speaking, copyright in any form, including CC, doesn't fit in too well with Asian ideas of knowledge, since it enables those controlling knowledge and information over the rest, and we find it impossible to emerge winners in this game. It is a colonial law, not meant to serve the interest of the people of those parts of the globe that are not ahead in the information race! Why should we be as respectful to it, as, say, Lawrence Lessig is?" "
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A lot of work goes into creating a good API.
The amount of work put it doesn't matter a single bit as "sweat of the brow [wikipedia.org]" is not sufficient to grant copy right in the US since 1991 (since Feist_v._Rural [wikipedia.org]). The rest of your opinion, quite frankly, is tainted by that opening statement and it's implied relevance to the discussion.
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See my other comments here clarification about it being hard "creative" work.
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Correlation does not prove causation, but interesting paper none-the-less reading the summary: "Copyright and Creativity -- Evidence from Italian Operas"
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/pa... [ssrn.com]
But even if it was true, should most of humanity be denied access to most of human knowledge via the internet that could otherwise be available right now (like via Google Books) so we might get a few more operas and other such thing?
Beside, current research (even by the US Federal Reserve) shows reward is not motivator for c
Re:IMHO Copyright sucks but APIs are copyrightable (Score:4, Informative)
Loved the first half of your comment; the second half I have issues with. Dan Pink's talk on motivation and creativity cited research done by the federal Reserve which included experiments in a poor country which agreed with the general findings. So it is not just white middle class -- it is human. As for Bill Gates, he bought DOS from someone who had according to some sources essentially stolen it from his employer.
http://www.businessweek.com/st... [businessweek.com]
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu... [ieee.org]
Bill Gates was born a multimillionaire in today's dollars and could have spent his life working on free software if he wished.
http://philip.greenspun.com/bg... [greenspun.com]
Emacs is essentially a word processor, especially when coupled with tools like LaTex,
I was using a word processor (in ROM) on a Commodore PET around 1980. Many other word processors were created, along with drawing programs, and so on. PLATO preceded pretty much of of that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P... [wikipedia.org]
"PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations)[1][2] was the first generalized computer assisted instruction system. Starting in 1960, it ran on the University of Illinois' ILLIAC I computer. By the late 1970s, it supported several thousand graphics terminals distributed worldwide, running on nearly a dozen different networked mainframe computers. Many modern concepts in multi-user computing were developed on PLATO, including forums, message boards, online testing, e-mail, chat rooms, picture languages, instant messaging, remote screen sharing, and multiplayer games."
Or with Forth, funded in part by federal dollars:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F... [wikipedia.org]
"Forth was first exposed to other programmers in the early 1970s, starting with Elizabeth Rather at the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory.[6] After their work at NRAO, Charles Moore and Elizabeth Rather formed FORTH, Inc. in 1973, refining and porting Forth systems to dozens of other platforms in the next decade."
And don't forget "The Mother of All Demos" by Doug Engelbart:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
""The Mother of All Demos" is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, computer demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor (collaborative work). Engelbart's presentation was the first to publicly demonstrate all these elements in a single system. The demonstration was highly influential and spawned similar projects at Xerox PARC in the early 1970s. The underlying technologies influenced both the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows graphical user interface operating systems in the 1980s and 1990s."
The reason we use what we use may relate to "capitalism", but it has more to do with the rich getting richer and market position and advertising and (sometimes illegal as with Microsoft antitrust) wheeling and dealing with supplier contracts and press and such, funding alliances, sweat heart deals with governments, and a bunch of similar things.
Rewards, in the presence of artificial scarcity, can control people. But people don't do their most creative work in such a regime. Under such a
BIOS (Score:2)
Isn't it like what Compaq did with IBM's BIOS?
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You mean Phoenix technology, and IBM's BIOS--
And NO.
The IBM BIOS contained actual program instructions. This would be akin to saying "The high level mapping of what the interrupts in the vector table do cant be copyrighted."
EG, "INT13 handles disk IO"
What Phoenix Tech did was look at what INT13 actually *DID*, then make their own implementation that works basically the same way, so that software that hooks INT13 from the vector table does not know the difference.
This allowed clone manufacturers to build ful
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Or AMD/Cyrus/etc did wtih the x86 instruction set. Or what Intel did with teh amd64 instruction set?
...fixes things that aren't broken? (Score:2)
I hope they fix this one. Otherwise its pretty damn broken.
It's simple if you understand the law... (Score:2)
Is an API copyrightable? Of course it is. It's a work of authorship like any other written work.
What escapes most people is that a copyright is not an absolute, exclusive right to keep others from copying the work. Function calls using an API would be a "fair use" of the work, and would be excepted under existing U.S. copyright law. (I'll leave it to you to google the term yourselves.) Copying the code behind the functioning of the library of the API would not be a fair use. Does one have to include the nam
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Assume the API is a separate file like headers in C. I think the question here is can I use your header file for my program but have the interface point toward the code I created? That is a bit tougher. In itself, it has no value, but it is a piece of work... but technically w/o an implementation, it might as well be a random string of characters.
Personally, I follow your logic, the API is equivalent to a table of contents and using it alone should fall under fair use. Even if it by itself (meaning no b
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Assume the API is a separate file like headers in C. I think the question here is can I use your header file for my program but have the interface point toward the code I created? That is a bit tougher.
Not really. In that case all you've done is copied the names of the objects from the header file (created by Oracle here) and written your own functional code that meets the specification of the API. I think that's the key here: Oracle intended that the API set a standard in the industry. How can Oracle argue that it is not a fair use to copy bits of it that were intended to be used by the public? How can Oracle argue that it didn't grant an implied license that makes the copying of the API a fair use?
The i
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Not all written works are copyrightable in the U.S. See the Feist v. Rural Supreme Court decision. A phone book is not eligible for copyright in so much as it's a mechanical collection of facts. Copyright law in the U.S. requires there be some minimal original "creativity" in the work in order for it to be copyrightable.
Agreed ... and my short comment doesn't consider that. But, I don't think you'd disagree with me that the fashioning of an API requires creativity and is a work of authorship.
I believe that's Google and the EFF's argument. To their viewpoint, the API proper is a description of facts: "This library exposes this function, with these parameters in this order.". Moreover, there isn't an creativity in expressing those facts in the form they're in (the format of the header files and the like), because the form is either dictated mechanically by the need to interact with the compiler/interpreter, or is the "obvious" representation.
If the language itself requires a particular format, then the use of that format is not (in and of itself) authorship. The names of the functions, the arrangement of paragraphs/spacing in the code, the comments left by the author, etc. that are not specified by the language are.
Obviousness is for patent law, but need not be considered
A Flamebait Summary? (Score:2)
The names backing the brief include Bjarne Stroustrup, Ken Thompson, Guido van Rossum, and many other luminaries.
It's like reading Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Honey Boo Boo, and many other luminaries
GNU GPL (Score:2, Interesting)
Most of Java is free software, under the terms of the GNU GPL, and Android Java is also open-source, so how can Google infringe any copyright?
Well, Android Java is not released under the GPL, but rather the incompatible Apache 2.0 license.
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Most of Java is free software, under the terms of the GNU GPL, and Android Java is also open-source, so how can Google infringe any copyright?
This question shows a lot of understandable confusion, because Java is multiple things, some of which cannot be copyrighted and some of which can, and in the latter case multiple implementations exist with different owners and different copyright licensing situations.
Java is programming language. The Java programming language is a pure idea, which can't be copyrighted. The programming language includes the syntax and semantics of the language. Documentation describing the language can be and is copyrighte
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I thought the class libraries that are taken from standard Java are actually Apache Harmony. There may be modifications by Google, and there are plenty more libraries that are unique to Android, but they have not written everything from scratch.
WINE (Score:3)
This would be good news for the WINE project!
Now I'm wondering when we'll see the first compatibility layer allowing OS/X programs to be run on linux.
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We have that; it's called GNUStep and it's actually existed longer than OS X has.
What, you think Apple invented everything?
GNUstep is only source compatible (Score:2)
We have that; it's called GNUStep and it's actually existed longer than OS X has.
Last time I checked, GNUstep was only source compatible with Cocoa, not binary compatible. This means end users have to somehow convince a proprietary application's publisher to stop drinking Apple's proverbial flavored water exclusively. Good luck with that.
What, you think Apple invented everything?
Not everything, mind you, but a company since bought by Apple did create the NeXTstep API on which Cocoa and GNUstep are based.
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And your point would be?
We're talking about APIs here -- the interfaces. The source code compatability layer.
GNUstep is therefore compatible within the context of the discussion, regardless of Apple's implementation of those APIs.
APIs are recipes (Score:3)
An API is a point of fact, as is a recipe, neither of which is copyrightable. Copyrighting an API is like creating an interface IFoo and then telling the world that they can't implement it.
Book Analogy (Score:2)
Now in this case Google came along and created a new library with the same functionality and interface as what Oracle provides. The whole point was to provide something identical so that programmers wouldn't notice the difference.
Going back to the book analogy, it isn't the case
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Except that only the names have been copied. Google provided their own story. (Which is proven by the fact that Oracle didn't allege copyright infringement on any of the actual code except one trivial function, which was dismissed as de-minimus, especially since it had already been replaced.)
The thing you seem to be overlooking is that functionality is something that is specifically excluded from copyright protection. (Which is why trying to make book analogies for software is usually a complete waste of ti
Oh, *now* it's OK to extend the Java API ... (Score:3)
(If Google wins, does that mean Microsoft can put Java back into Windows again?)
absolute nonsense (Score:3)
Microsoft took Sun's JVM and extended it, without complying with Sun's license.
Google used *none* of Sun/Oracle code, but Oracle is still trying to claim some kind of copyright over the code that Google wrote. This contradicts statements that Sun itself made before it died and was sold to Oracle.
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To address your somewhat inaccurate analogy first.
A bayonet mount can by patented, which has a limited duration (a couple of decades). After that expires then anyone can make the same mount.
Copyrights are not patents. Copyrights have a duration that no reasonable person could consider to be limited. Anything longer than the life span of an average person is not short. Effectively indefinite as copyrights can exist through multiple ages.
I suppose you could patent an API. I don't know of anyone who has, but i
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The courts have previously sent a clear message about this:
http://www.project-disco.org/i... [project-disco.org]
The stupid Kathleen O'Malley judge bitch is probably on Oracle's pay roll in some fashion.
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More akin to words (or perhaps standard phrases). The programmer uses them to express something creative (a program), but they themselves are simply tools of creativity, not creative expressions in themselves.
This is why computer languages have been ruled non-copyrightable. And APIs are simply extensions of a computer language. In some languages (e.g. tcl), the boundary between language element and API is arbitrary and subject to change without notice.
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It's more like the table of contents. It describes where things are but not the details or text of what's in a chapter.
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I think we can do better for a 'real world analogy' (you know, as if APIs weren't in the real world). How about strictly-defined 'protocols' for human interaction, such as the radio protocol/etiquette used between an airline pilot and the tower? There seems a reasonable analogy to an API there.
I presume you can't copyright a radio protocol, but of course you can copyright a book on the subject.
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The API **IS** the intellectual property.
I'm sure all you salt-weighted wonders already have all the world's problems solved in Interface classes...
The API is essentially like the the titles of chapters in a book. If you are calling *that* your intellectual property, and thus the real value behind what you write, then no developer "worth their salt" should worry. No one will ever copy your useless code. You have no need for copyright.
Those creative ones who write the actual valuable content under those chapter titles are already protected.
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Don't be silly - keep the API to any software version 1.0 but completely gut the implementation and what does the end user have?
Version 2.0.
v2.0 of same software is copy / derivative work (Score:3, Interesting)
> A version 2.0 which is also under a renewed copyright, since the guts were re-written. I'm failing to understand the point.
I'm not GP, but I think their point is you end up with version 2.0 OF THE SAME SOFTWARE. Since it's essentially a next version of the same software, and heavily based on the design of the first version, it is a copy or derivative work of v1. Since it is a copy, the copy-rights of the v1 author should be respected.
GP reasons that in the Oracle / Google case, Google essentially
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POSIX open, named by Stallman, predates SCO (Score:2, Offtopic)
POSIX is explicitly an open set of standards, Richard Stallman of GNU chose the name. As an open standard, the copyright allows both SCO and Red Hat to implement them.
Also, POSIX predates SCO (barely), so both implementations derive from the standards, POSIX is not derived from SCO.
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Also, POSIX predates SCO (barely)
There appears to be a lack of clarity in how we define [c2.com] "SCO". I was using "SCO UNIX" to refer to all UNIX variants containing code derived from AT&T UNIX, as opposed to those deriving from 4.4BSD, which excised all AT&T code except for the API now known as POSIX. AT&T later sold UNIX to Novell, which sold it to SCO, hence "SCO UNIX". You might be referring only to SCO OpenServer, which is based on Xenix [wikipedia.org], Microsoft's port of AT&T UNIX code to the IBM PC architecture.
so both implementations derive from the standards
And Android derives from p
again, POSIX open, Java not (Score:2)
It's kind of tough to define "SCO" in a way that predates 1988, but okay.
Yes, Android implements both the Java Language Specification and some lower level stuff (is a copy of Java, arguably) .
So let's have a look at the license related to that:
https://docs.oracle.com/javase... [oracle.com]
Note it says you may not implement the spec because that would be copying Java, you may make copies of the documentation for certain purposes.
Linux implements part of POSIX. Have a look at that license.
Re:As any developer worth their salt knows (Score:5, Funny)
def fastFactorPrimeNum(primenum):
"""quickly factor a prime number"""
return 1, primenum
Happy to help. Only copyright stands in the way of breaking cryptography forever.
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"""quickly factor a prime number"""
I think that you can skip this step.
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It was skipped; that's a comment in Python. The return statement is all the code needed.
Famous Titles (Score:2)
Also, notably, book titles are not copyrightable [writersdigest.com] even though they may arguably be the most important part of the work. Neither are slogans, recipes, telephone directories, or substantially non-creative works. There are good and bad APIs, and you can do a creative interpretation of an API (a poetic reading, perhaps) which may be copyrightable, but the API itself is not a sufficiently creative work.
Name the type, or statement is meaningless (Score:5, Informative)
There is no law covering "Intellectual Property" so you've actually said nothing at all. Legally, it's an empty sentence.
The laws governing copyright, patents, trademarks and every other legal concept commonly lumped under the banner of "Intellectual Property" are all entirely different, and in most cases they are mutually exclusive. This makes using them in the aggregate as "Intellectual Property" legally meaningless if one is trying to state something concrete.
The issue at stake in the topic is whether APIs are copyrightable, so perhaps you meant to say "APIs are copyrightable". However, since you haven't bothered to say WHY you think they are copyrightable, your contribution on the matter is exactly zero.
47 USC 230(e)(2) (Score:2)
Legally, it's an empty sentence.
Then what does 47 USC 230(e)(2) [cornell.edu] mean? The text is "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property."
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It's legal stupidity.
If IP then unaffected by 230 (Score:2)
It specifically says that the section has no effect on any such laws.
It's an IF-THEN construction: IF a law is "intellectual property", THEN section 230 has no effect on it. So if "intellectual property" is a meaningless term, how should a judge determine which laws are excluded from section 230's effect?
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I disagree. The term "intellectual property" is a useful super-set for the group of sets "copyright", "patent", etcetera, that all result from different legislative
Re:Name the type, or statement is meaningless (Score:4, Informative)
Copyright originated as a balance between the needs of the creator (at the time, usually a writer) to have a monopoly on their work so as to make money from said work (and not have random publishers spitting out knock off copies without compensating the author) and the needs of the public to build on the works.
Patents came to be out of a desire to build upon others' works. The alternative to patents are trade secrets and, at one time, every industry was run by a guild that viciously protected their secrets. If you wanted to break into that industry (or build on what they were doing), you needed to know these secrets and you couldn't know that unless the guild allowed you to know. With patents, companies could "own" a technique/technology for a limited time in exchange for the knowledge being made public and being freely available when the patent expired.
The abuse of copyrights was primarily due to their length. In the original form at the time of the USA's founding, copyright length was 14 years plus a one-time 14 year renewal. Nowadays, they can be 120 years long. Patents, meanwhile, were abused by being applied to anything and everything. Performing a common task but with a computer? Patent it. Add in a patent office with a "approve it all and let the courts sort it out" combined with courts with a "if the patent office approved it, assume it is valid", and it is easy to see why this was messed up.
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While indeed the current trend is to abuse copyright via absurd lengths, "modern" copyright law originated much earlier than the USA's founding - in Europe, where it was used as a means to ensure that only words agreeable to the Crown and the Church were distributed, as the technology of the printing press began to spread in the 15th and 16th centuries. Note that the first privileges of monopoly were given to the printers, not the authors; e.g. in Britain the latter were not "protected" by the Law until the
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Copyright originated as a balance between the needs of the creator (at the time, usually a writer) to have a monopoly on their work so as to make money from said work (and not have random publishers spitting out knock off copies without compensating the author) and the needs of the public to build on the works.
No it didn't. Copyright originated as a monopoly granted to publishers to prevent other publishers from horning in on their action. From the very beginning, the actual authors were given short shrift indeed.
Re:As any developer worth their salt knows (Score:4, Interesting)
Because once you've got that, all the valuable work's done, right? Because what's left is just a SMOP?
Horse shit. As a copyrightable work, a bare API is grossly incomplete. With just the API, you've got _nothing_. It doesn't work. You can't make it work. You have to actually create or acquire the thing it describes to make it work. All of it. The converse is true, too. You have to have both parts to actually use the work. When judging whether copyright has been infringed, two of the major considerations are what fraction of the work has been copied, and what effect the allegedly infringing work has on the market for the original. It's simple: if I distribute _just_ the headers, nobody's going to want to come to me to get what I've copied, because it's a useless pile of shit without that implementation backing it. It's nothing. They get that part right along with the actual copyrightable work, for free. The part I copied resembles the whole about as much as a book's table of contents and index resemble the book -- Google even stripped the blurbs.
Personally, I think the EFF's concern (and the appeals court's distinction) are in error, that they lend credence to a distinction that has no right to so much as exist. The law says that fair use does not infringe. It doesn't say it's infringement but it's permissible. It says that fair use is not an infringement at all. It says that copyright does not, by statute law, extend to cover fair use. Alsup said you can't copyright APIs because they're simply functional descriptions, which aren't copyrightable. Whether or not the Supreme Court accepts his opinion on the legal basis, he's right: distributing just the API is also intrinsically fair use because it is intrinsically, by nature, wholly incomplete, to the extent that it's utterly unusable, completely unmarketable, of no value whatsoever without an actual work that usefully matches its description. Copyright simply doesn't have the reach to cover it.
APIs can be creative works; we need another plan (Score:2, Informative)
I've read that Linus Torvald's brilliance (aside from management) has been mostly in creating good APIs for the Linux Kernel. His initial implementations of those APIs was not too good and was replaced by the community, but the APIs live on. It takes a lot of effort to imagine, design, and redesign good APIs. It is overall often much easier to implement an API than to design an API because the design of the API is a creative act of deciding how to partition the problem space and prioritize aspects of it. Na
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Re:APIs can be creative works; we need another pla (Score:5, Informative)
There are a few different types of APIs involved with Linux, so it is more than the public API:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
Consider: ... Here's an example that shows how this all works. The Linux USB code has been rewritten at least three times. We've done this over time in order to handle things that we didn't originally need to handle, like high speed devices, and just because we learned the problems of our first design, and to fix bugs and security issues. Each time we made changes in our api, we updated all of the kernel drivers that used the apis, so nothing would break. And we deleted the old functions as they were no longer needed, and did things wrong. Because of this, Linux now has the fastest USB bus speeds when you test out all of the different operating systems. We max out the hardware as fast as it can go, and you can do this from simple userspace programs, no fancy kernel driver work is needed."
http://www.kroah.com/log/linux... [kroah.com]
"For Linux, we don't have a stable internal api, and for people to wish that we would have one is just foolish.
And:
http://www.helixsoft.nl/blog/?... [helixsoft.nl]
"Linux pioneered that model: they call a stable API nonsense. The interface between drivers and the kernel changes all the time. If the Linux developers think of a better, more consistent or more efficient way to interface with the drivers they go ahead and make that change."
Thinking up "a better, more consistent or more efficient way" to interface sounds like creative work to me.
I had a similar disagreement with Alan Kay who argued that programs are mathematical. Given that for our Garden Simulator my wife spent over a year full time translating badly-named spaghetti Fortran code from EPIC to well-structured Delphi code that did essentially *exactly* the same thing, but now was understandable and maintainable, I see *enormous* benefit in naming functions, parameters, and structures well and know how long it may take to do that.
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... [kurtz-fernhout.com]
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/... [kurtz-fernhout.com]
If you don't believe well-named APIs have great value, try, say, reverse engineering compacted JavaScript code. It's possible, but it takes an enormous amount of time. From another angle, most of what is written in fiction is about the same old thing -- human conflicts, human emotions, human behavior, and so on; what differs is often mainly the nuances of how things are described or the sequence they are described in. Why should Disney get a copyright on "Snow White" (the movie) just because it attached some specific names and faces to seven dwarfs when the story itself was public domain at that point? What difference is there in that case from giving names to functions and parameters for Java when the general notion of calling into a virtual machine is also effectively in the public domain?
However, I still think you have missed my point because you say I desire copyrighted APIs. I'd rather see copyright rolled back entirely or at least greatly restricted like along the lines Richard Stallman proposes. What I am saying is that as long as one supports copyright as it is now, and as it is being expanded, then you have to accept APIs should be copyrightable. In that sense, if you believe in the value of copyrighting computer software, Linux should *not* have been legally made ignoring that copyright violation sued to be mostly just a civil matter until recently it became criminal, and that the UNIX copyright holders would have had to chosen to purse Linux in court).
I think we probably agree on the moral an economic aspects of FOSS. My point is that we should not be trying to carve out special exemptions for APIs when the whole copyright edifice is maki
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The value in those APIs is not in the names and parameter types of the prototypes, it is in the semantics, in how they actually work. You'll notice that he did provide proof-of-concept implementations. Why would he do that, if the function-call prototypes had any considerable value on their own?
A Google Engineer about APIs' importance (Score:2)
Top down programming is a recognized form of design. With a bigger initial team, you could imagine Linus might have never written any implementations of APIs as other team member could have filled that in, but he still have made an enormous creative contribution by good design. Example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
"A top-down approach (also known as stepwise design and in some cases used as a synonym of decomposition) is essentially the breaking down of a system to gain insight into its compositional su
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I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.
Because nobody can get anyone to pay anything for what want to get paid for, right? Because it couldn't matter less how much precious and endearingly precocious effort you put into an API, it's worth exactly nothing without an implementation.to back it up. In combination with a good implementation, it's very valuable. In combination with a pile-of-crap implementation, it's a pile of crap. Alone, it's worthless. It's the 99%-perspiration part that has always constituted the valuable things in this world.
API was worth taking, risking (Score:2)
> With just the API, you've got _nothing_.
Google had a choice to either develop their own API, license the Java API, or take the Java API and fight a law suit about it. When license negotiations didn't work out, they decided that using the Java API rather than their own was worth fighting this suit over. So clearly the API was worth a lot to Google.
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Yes, and when I stop by and eat at the Pantry downtown, it's usually very late or very early (the lines are far too long other times), there are often beggars outside who ask for money. It's easier and kinder to give them some. I set myself a limit of $5 a day for that kind of charity. If some self-entitled prick of a beggar demanded more than I'm glad to charitably give, I'd tell him to fuck off and walk on by. Oracle's demanding control as if there were a full implementation on offer, not something the
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If you leave out important data in a method call, you can't implement the method. If you ask for too much information, the user of the API won't like it. If you don't use philosophically consistent names, parameters and objects, you'll confuse your user.
Think designing an easy to use API is trrivial? Try designing an API for a windowing library. How many efforts have there been? Win32, AWT,
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The API **IS** the intellectual property.
Hey, it looks like we are playing the Speak Funny Nonsense Game. Its one of my favorites!
My turn:
"All computer hardware Engineers worth their salt know that the ALU in a CPU consists entirely of cat fur and dust bunnies"
OK, your turn!
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Sentence (Optional A As Indefinite Article, N as noun, V as verb, Optional B As Indefinite Article, Optional C As Adjective, Optional N2 As Noun)
Please refrain from posting using the API I established. Also refrain from using math such as X = Y + Z.
Thank you in advance, Mr. How Sad This Actually Is Going To The Supreme Court DOT COM guy.
If API are copyright, I claim ownership of the API Name-Address
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It is not. The API is the _idea_ what something is supposed to do. Technical/scientific/mathematical ideas are not protected, and rightfully so.
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OK that is a good point - a well crafted distributed sort vs a cut/pasted from stack overflow bubble sort... true enough.
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It sounds like you don't have half a clue about how software works.
Are you by chance Judge Kathleen O'Malley?
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"Intellectual property" is a propaganda term designed to conflate multiple unrelated things (copyrights, patents, trademarks, etc.). I suggest you people drop it. When you mean copyright, say copyright. When you mean patents, say patents. Etc.
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Quoting a small snippet from a larger work with attribution in the USA is generally fair use. But in any case, how can the Free Software Foundation claim that code that links to GPL libraries even *dynamically* is a derived work if APIs are not copyrightable? As much as I am against excessive copyright, people can't have it both ways.
Others disagree though, although I think they are probably wrong (but its up to the courts etc...):
https://www.publicknowledge.or... [publicknowledge.org]
"There's a dangerous meme going around that
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Yep I just copyrighted memcpy.
Pay up bitches, I'm planning on building an island to support my starship launching pad to support my spacebase on Saturn's moons.
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This is the internet. Telling an AC to shut up makes as much sense as removing a grain of sand in order to make the desert smaller.
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The truth is, designing APIs is part of what programmers do every day. Yes, some programmers are better than others, some programmers work harder than others. That's something between them and their managers. It's not something where the law shoul
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Designing public APIs is not a common role. The vast majority of people who do it are not even slightly competent at it. Google? Amazon? Many other big names? All terrible. I can count the amount of good APIs Ive seen on my fingers.
And its not about being a snowflake, on the contrary. Writers, designers, movie directors...they all get rewarded in the same way for taking a random idea and publishing a nice interpretation of that idea. Finding the correct words to put on these ideas, for example, can be seen
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It's more common than you think. Arguably all open source projects do that implicitly. Also, commercial projects, where the customers get to programmatically interact with a service, or a library, require some form of it. That's a good deal of what cloud computing promises the world should look like, by the way.
Really the only types of products that I can think of just now which don't specify public APIs of some kind are traditional GUI apps intended for deskt
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No, its not more common than I'd think. All your examples generally have a lot of people behind them, and only a fraction of those people design the API. You can have a product with 500 developers behind it, and have 1-2 people working on the API design. And thats not counting the countless people who make APIs nilly willy (I don't consider that designing an API in the same way this post isn't a hardcover novel.).
I guess it was a poor choice of wording on my part. You're right, most products involve some fo
Another freeman on the land (Score:2)
Btw, the legal name you think is your's is copyright protected and owned by the Crown Corporation and hence they own you, the body of the work. You better lose the legal name quickly or continue being a dead by consent slave!
This "birth certificate fraud" stuff sounds like the discredited "freeman on the land" theory [rationalwiki.org].
Murder Oracle! (Score:2)
Let's kill Oracle! Support and promote PostgreSql to wipe them off the face of the Earth like the lawyer-filled vermin they are.
Google? They are growing annoying, but Oracle has jumped the open shark too many times.
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You have to remember that the protection code has is reduced compared to the protection that other works of art has. The law and precedence (IANAL) acknowledge that there is significant amount of function (i.e. - non-copyrightable) parts to a program.
The question here, as I see it (and, again, IANAL) is whether the function's arrangement and names, which might have some expressive (i.e. - copyrightable) value to begin with, can turn to purely functional by the simple fact that implementing it is essential i
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Your solution would immediately bankrupt all software companies. I can't say that I like it...
and as far as I was aware, the U.S. Government doesn't bother to punish piracy except for the very worst offenders. (You wouldn't be one of those, would you?)
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