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Supreme Court Asked to Review if APIs can be Copyrighted

posted by LaminatorX on Thursday October 09 2014, @05:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the can't-touch-this dept.

kaszz writes:

Google beat Oracle in the trial court, where a judge with a software background ruled that APIs could not be copyrighted. but the Appeals court sided with Oracle, ruling that APIs can be copyrighted. Google now asks the Supreme Court to review the issue of whether APIs can be copyrighted and is asking the Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court decision.

(Of interest may also be the earlier dispute in 2012 whether a programming language can be copyrighted. This presumably relates to whether Google violated copyright by using a variant of the Java language and its APIs in the Android framework. Oracle, who thinks it can be, has used J.R.R. Tolkein's Elvish language as an examples (PDF) of a language that can be copyrighted. Google disagrees)

 
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  • (Score: 2) by opinionated_science on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:43PM

    by opinionated_science (4031) on Thursday October 09 2014, @06:43PM (#104158)

    here is why an API can't be copyrighted...

    char* cure_cancer(struct human_genome* patient_genome)

    char* prescribe_drug(* medical_chart)

    I can claim these magical things to a magic black box that carries them out. The API is just an index, the actual magic code is elsewhere....

    Starting Score:    1  point
    Karma-Bonus Modifier   +1  
    Total Score:   2  

  • (Score: 2) by kaszz on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:15PM

    by kaszz (4211) on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:15PM (#104176) Journal

    You can copyright the names:
    cure_cancer
    human_genome
    patient_genome
    prescribe_drug
    medical_chart

    Or their use in a certain order.

    Or the binary sequence number that is the API.

    And of course any description of the interface.

    Otoh.. I think this is all nonsense. And if the supreme court side with Oracle the whole industry (in USA) will have a big problem. The emulation called Wine for starters will be in big trouble. Same for ReactOS, 3rd party clients to facebook etc. An interesting situation would occur if companies outside of USA can make use of affected APIs but companies within USA can't..

    • (Score: 2) by Adamsjas on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:55PM

      by Adamsjas (4507) on Thursday October 09 2014, @07:55PM (#104189)

      No, I don't think you can copyright those words, but people have tried this in the past. They just about always lose in court.
      There has to be more substance than simply a couple words. If you invented ALL the words, (say of Elvish or Klingon) you might have a case, but simply stringing common words together with a few joining characters isn't going to cut it.

      See this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality [wikipedia.org]