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Should an API be Copyrightable?

posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday January 30 2019, @08:33AM   Printer-friendly
from the chickens-coming-home-to-roost dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Google has appealed its case with Oracle to the Supreme Court of the United States over a dispute about whether a java API may be copyrighted.

The ARS Technica Story: Google asks Supreme Court to overrule disastrous ruling on API copyrights.

The consensus among the comments on ARS seem to be that this will result in a substantial amount of litigation. I'm forced to ask whether this future litigation should have happened already, and that this paradigm shift is just a matter of catching up to the effects of a previous bad ruling Lotus v. Borland from the early 1990s.

I get that it is going to cause a lot of code refactoring. But won't that also create a lot of new products? The other thing to consider is that communications protocols are essentially API specifications. Historically intellectual property protection for protocols is very weak. Some (myself at least) would attribute the effectiveness of the EEE business tactic to the inability to defend protocol compatibility within the legal framework provided by the USPTO and Copyright Office.

Which is to say that an Oracle victory may expand the scope of FOSS licensing, giving FOSS developers more say over how their products are used. This would reduce barrier to entry in new communications product markets that are based on FOSS, and give more power to startups.

Yes it is going to be expensive for established players if Oracle wins. Most people seem to agree with that. That is the price of operating on a bad premise. Does it matter whether responsibility for the premise resides with a judge or a CEO? Aren't there also some upsides if Oracle wins? What are the trade offs?

Of course the whole thing could be a put on.

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  • (Score: 2, Disagree) by c0lo on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:25PM (2 children)

    by c0lo (156) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday January 30 2019, @12:25PM (#794020) Journal

    They'd be products that didn't need to exist, are a waste of programmer-hours that could have better been spent not reinventing the wheel.

    While I somehow agree with the "don't re-invent the wheel if you don't want to" the "utilitarian" argument is flawed if pushed too hard.
    In extreme, the "don't reinvent the wheel because it's a waste of programmer-hours" translates into:
    * don't reinvent Windows, Linux has no need to exist and is a waste of programming hours
    * don't sculpt yet another nude, thousands already exist and any new one is a waste of artist-hours
    * "Westend story" is a total waste of playwright-hours, we already have "Romeo & Juliet"
     

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  • (Score: 0, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @04:06PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 30 2019, @04:06PM (#794096)

    In extreme, the "don't reinvent the wheel because it's a waste of programmer-hours" translates into:

    *don't reinvent Windows, Linux has no need to exist and is a waste of programming hours

    Linux is based on the Unix API, which is older than Windows. If anything, Windows is the reinvented wheel. And I'm sure a lot of people here do think it was a waste of programmer hours. ;-)

    *don't sculpt yet another nude, thousands already exist and any new one is a waste of artist-hours

    If it is just-another-nude, then most probably it is a waste of artist-hours.

    *"Westend story" is a total waste of playwright-hours, we already have "Romeo & Juliet"

    If it simply retold "Romeo & Juliet" in different words, it probably would be.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 31 2019, @09:39AM (#794465)
    In an alternate universe where Windows provided the same freedoms and functionality as Linux now gives us, maybe Linux would have had never needed to exist. Same thing in an alternate universe where Unix System Labs v. Berkeley Software Design didn't happen. We might all be using BSD or Hurd today.