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Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court To Rule APIs Can't Be Copyrighted
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."
The API **IS** the intellectual property.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
U.S.A. #1
API's akin to book / song titles which are not Copyrightable?
Sorry. No yipppeee for you!
Can I create a camera which is using nikon or canon bayonet without purchasing the patent / copyright? I sincerely don't know, but I would imagine not. API is a spec, pretty much like a bayonet mount is...
"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
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I recall there were alternative chipsets for both Intel and AMD CPUs coming from companies like VIA and nVidia.
As an earlier comment cogently observes, the API IS the intellectual property, dating back through Java, the x86 CPU market and plug-compatible mainframes. The Court has to decide whether APIs are copyrightable expressions of creative works (lawyers, please comment.) I hope they're not, but fear they are.
Just make computer-related material copyright last only a year (and ban software patents), and that will solve most of the problems.
Random thought for the day: Patents and Copyright are Fascism (state ownership of the means of production, in that the state claims a monopoly on anything produced as described in the patent or copyright).
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
The API **IS** the intellectual property.
Nope. The code behind the API is the intellectual property. (Or are we free to copy that now, just wrap it in a different API ???) APIs are always the simple part.
This is the choice, eh? I think I'm gonna barf...
What does Comcast have to do with APIs? Maybe you should STFU when you don't know what you are talking about.
It's like Ford trying to make it illegal to build a trailer that can fit Ford trucks' trailer hitches or a transmission that can inter-operate with Ford cars. It's scummy and it damn well should be illegal.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
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.
The public interfaces for the API should be in the public domain. The private interfaces and the actual code should be subject to copyright. If someone wants to reverse engineer, say, the BIOS of a PC, by writing new code for the public interfaces, let them.
So standard I/O can be copyrighted?
I am torn about this. If you have a complicate problem to solve, and you spend a couple of months in a team of engineers laying out the different components and the APIs after researching what interfaces make the most sense, that IS pretty inventive. I mean, we all know many MANY programmers/engineers who write atrocious code and have no idea how to design a proper interface. They will "functionally" get something working, but it's just atrocious code. That being said, why SHOULDN"T someone who designs "proper" code get some kind of protection? I am not saying a 20 years worth of patent protection, but the limited protection (in terms of "scope" - not length) that copyright offers. Why should some other guy be able to come in, just take all the work that you put in in figuring out a well designed API and just be able to duplicate it? With all due respect given to all this "blah blah we don't want protection for software blah blah".. There is something inherently morally wrong about being able to coattail ride on someones hard work. Perhaps the compromise would be to ensure that "accidental" copyright violations would not be punished, but intentional copyright violations would be punished..
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...
See also:
http://www.neurope.eu/article/...
"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/...
""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?" "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Isn't it like what Compaq did with IBM's BIOS?
I've got better things to do tonight than die.
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.
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. Naming things well and creating elegant structure are often creative acts, and those are core tasks in creating a good API. A good API may seem so obvious we take it for granted, but that ease-of-use may be the product of years of hard-won experience. As in: "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)"
See my other post questioning the value of copyright to society, but if copyright is about creativity, then IMHO APIs are often creative, and sometimes much more creative than implementations.
Copyright expansion is continually being pushed, most lately for fashion:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...
However, by the same argument fashion can't be copyrighted because it is "useful", likewise *no* software should be copyrightable.
http://www.npr.org/2012/09/10/...
http://www.mttlrblog.org/2013/...
"Fashion design in the U.S. currently lacks copyright protection. Section 101 of the Copyright Act states that "pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works" are only protected if the design can be separated from and exists independently of the usefulness of the article. In the U.S., fashion designs are not seen as having creative value, but are rather seen solely as utilitarian."
Really, why can someone copyright "Microsoft Office", which is essentially just a bunch of instructions when they can't copyright a Gucci purse? It makes no sense, but that is so true about so much of copyright.
Short of repealing copyright (a good thing to consider IMHO), and because copyright is now effectively infinite and the bargain with the community has been broken by copyright holders by extending copyright, another approach is to tax it, as I suggested a decade ago based on an idea in someone slashdot sig:
"Copyright Tax for the Privilege of the Monopoly"
http://journalism.berkeley.edu...
Personally, I'd rather see copyright replaced with a basic income so all would-be authors had the time needed to create. That is based on this idea:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
"Douglas disagreed with classical economists who recognised only three factors of production: land, labour and capital. While Douglas did not deny the role of these factors in production, he saw the âoecultural inheritance of societyâ as the primary factor. He defined cultural inheritance as the knowledge, techniques and processes that have been handed down to us incrementally from the origins of civilization (i.e. progress). Consequently, mankind does not have to keep "reinventing the wheel". "We are merely the administrators of that cultural inheritance, and to that extent the cultural inheritance is the property of all of us, without exception."
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I hope they fix this one. Otherwise its pretty damn broken.
It's the body of the work that's copyright protected. There are many different songs with the same name so the same applies to API's.
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! http://losethename.com/
The APIs that Linus used for Linux were not ones in general that he created. These APIs already existed in Unix. Linux was essentially a Unix cloning project. Rewriting it to remove the intellectual property attachments that still existed in Unix. The model that Google followed with Java for Android was very similar to what Linus did for the Linux rewrite of Unix. If the copyrightable APIs that you desire existed at the time then Linux could never well have come into existence and we would only have proprietary Unix which would have never would have taken off like Linux has since the primary attraction of Linux is the open source nature of it.
The only problem is that the Supremes won't understand any of the arguments. Scalia believes demons cause pigs to jump off cliffs. Only two of them have e-mail skills. This is argued before monkeys.
> 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 made a v2 COPY of Java. To have the right to make such a copy, they needed a copy right license.
It is unfortunate that the precedent- setting case involves such well-known companies that most of us have significant feelings about. It clouds the actual issue under discussion. I wanted Google to win because I like Google better than I like Oracle, but given that Google started by trying to negotiate a license, that indicates they thought they needed a license.
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?
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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 name of the functions and objects referenced in the API to use it? Of course. How could it not be a fair use of the API, if that API had been released for public use of the library?
But, since that legal principal seems to have escaped the EFF (as it isn't prominent in their brief and probably wasn't raised at trial), they're probably going to lose. That's what happens when you sacrifice competency for stinginess...
> 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.
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
Required reading for internet skeptics
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.
How big a deal is it, really, if they are? If they were and you actually wanted people to use your API, you'd just need to publish it under a permissive license. Otherwise it'd be unlikely to ever gain any traction. Also, if an API can be copyrighted, would that make everything implemented with that API a derivative work? If that were the case, I'm pretty sure AT&T would own the copyright on all computer code for the past 4 decades. Even Windows has some UNIX heritage. The idea of Bell Labs trying to actually assert that copyright is amusing enough that I kind of hope the Supreme Court rules that way.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
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.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
"...process, procedure...method of operation" covers an API pretty well.
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...
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...
"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/?...
"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/...
http://www.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
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
Legally, it's an empty sentence.
Then what does 47 USC 230(e)(2) mean? The text is "Nothing in this section shall be construed to limit or expand any law pertaining to intellectual property."
Also, notably, book titles are not copyrightable 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.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
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.
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.
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.
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...
"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 sub-systems. In a top-down approach an overview of the system is formulated, specifying but not detailing any first-level subsystems. Each subsystem is then refined in yet greater detail, sometimes in many additional subsystem levels, until the entire specification is reduced to base elements. A top-down model is often specified with the assistance of "black boxes", these make it easier to manipulate. However, black boxes may fail to elucidate elementary mechanisms or be detailed enough to realistically validate the model. Top down approach starts with the big picture. It breaks down from there into smaller segments."
What seems to me to be going on in the discussion here which disturbs me greatly as a software developer is that, in order to try to help win a political argument about interoperability, people are dismissing the creative aspect of naming things well and making good choices about module partitions. That is really really sad. It has taken me *decades* to get better at those tasks, and they remain hard, and I can still see how much I could improve on them. One pet project (the Pointrel system) I've been thinking about APIs for for thirty+ years trying to simplify and clarify the design. Maybe that is to excess :-) but in any case, an essential part of a good design is good names and good abstraction layers, and that can IMHO take a lot of effort and creativity.
But rather than, as I do, people here saying, yes good APIs demand effort and creative understanding of the problem domain, and the issue is that copyright is (or has become) a bad idea because it would restrict interoperability, people here tend to be saying, no, APIs aren't creative because it would be inconvenient if they were given how broad copyright now is. I think the end result of that is going to be:
1. Pissing off software designers
2. Losing the Supreme Court case too.
3. ???
4. Profit for those purveying artificial scarcity
(my half-ironic site on that: http://artificialscarcity.com/ )
Personally, I'm coming around just now to the thought that maybe most people on Slashdot really have never tried very hard to design great software API interfaces? Which fits the facts that most APIs I've ever had to deal with were fll of gotchas and confusing aspects. Contrast with, say, ObjectWorks Smalltalk, which in general had great APIs for streaming and such.
Maybe this discussion is an example of?
"When We Don't Like the Solution, We Deny the Problem"
http://science.slashdot.org/st...
The "solution" here (implied by Oracle) is that APIs are controllable by the copyright owner, and the problem is that APIs take a lot of hard creative work to get right? I propose other solutions, like a basic income and rolling back copyright.
If APIs were not hard to write and required creativity to do well, why are their articles giving advice on how to do it better? Example:
http://piwik.org/blog/2008/01/...
"Here are the main concepts I tried to apply when designing the API:
Easy to learn ; the documentation provides simple examples, complete documentation
Easy to use ; single
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
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.
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?
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.
Table-ized A.I.
If I were to write a book and then someone else comes along and writes another book with the same (or very similar) story and characters I can claim that they infringed my copyright even if the other book has a different name.
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 of two books by two different authors being called the same thing (which copyright allows) but two books being identical. The reader could choose either book and get the same information.
I thought software patents are the devil and what we all want is software copyrights. So, what is this really?
(If Google wins, does that mean Microsoft can put Java back into Windows again?)
APIs should be considered an index to the functionality contained in the library.
Indexes are not copyrightable.
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...
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.
Not exactly true. Google didn't make v2 as they made a version that mimics v1. To use a car analogy, a company cannot sell a copy of a Ford Mustang engine. But Ford should not be able to sue a company that makes an engine of their design that fits and work into Ford Mustangs.
Screw this copy/paste bullshit. You use the open Linux API changing without addressing the fact that it's *open* and can be copied, you confuse the Linux API with the Binary API to demonstrate API change, and then argue the value of "well-named APIs" even though copying an API is the issue not how thoughtful they may be.
How are APIs any different to song titles or chapter names?
They are part of the creative work that describe the content of the creative work.
...or so I was taught in the intellectual property course that we had to take at university.
Problem is APIs/header express no ideas, just names of functions, structures, etc. The implementations of the described functions are where those ideas are expressed and weren't copied...
Am I missing something? As it would seem making APIs/headers copyrightable sets a pretty low bar, as in skimming the ground. Noow that I think of it as well, wouldn't such a ruling that APIs can be copyrighted effectively mean that there would be no scope for parodies, e.g. Bored of the Rings anyone? I'm just mystified that even non-technical justices couldn't rule properly on this as it requires ZERO understanding of programming to understand that APIs/header express no ideas, just an index of names.
OTOH I always thought that slide to unlock was invalidated by (a) prior mechanical art and (b) it's obvious.
(IANAL)
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.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
All kinds of things fall outside copyright protection. For example fashion can not be copyrighted. Nor can recipe's for food. Short catchy phrases can not be copyrighted. The idea behind a joke can not by copyrighted. Fonts are free of copyright. Most of these exceptions exist because congress and the courts wanted smaller government. People all over the country made their own cloths. Copyright on fashion would be a large intrusion by the government in an everyday activity. Most families cooked their own meals. Enforcing copyright on food would require a massive intrusion on privacy. Copyrights on fonts were a threat to the freedom of speech. API should not be copyrighted because API are a form of language. People should be free to communicate with their machines and with their software. Once I learn the grammar and phrases of an API I should not be forced to work with a company for 150 years.
If it is illegal to distribute a work-in-progress independent implementation under the Java Language Specification license because only an implementation that "fully implements the Specification including all its required interfaces and functionality" may be distributed, then how are people supposed to collaborate to produce such an independent implementation in the first place?
That fact that it was clearly valuable to Google refutes the claim that it's nothing, that it's worthless. That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law. Instead, I should seek to apply the same fair rules to everyone. If I want my valuable property to be protected from unlawful taking, I have to apply the same rules to Oracle- even though I dislike Oracle.
If it's illegal to do that, they aren't supposed to do that. They are allowed to do that with Perl instead. Someone suggested that I implement export of Excel spreadsheets in an open source project I work on. That format is covered by Microsoft patents, so I instead export csv, which Excel can open.
If a company wants to lock things up and not allow me to contribute to an ecosystem around their product that's fine - I'll implement something based on open standards instead. I don't like it when companies do that, but they don't have to do what I want.
If it's illegal to do that, they aren't supposed to do that. They are allowed to do that with Perl instead.
Good luck getting all developers of Java applications to rewrite their applications from the ground up in Perl, and good luck finding a new job if your current job relies on internal-use Java applications.
Actually fashion designs aren't copyrightable anywhere and US government doesn't have the authority to change that. They are excluded from copyright along with recipes and a few other things considered necessities of living by the Berne Convention of which the US is a signatory. Changing a law in contravention to a treaty the us has signed is very often unconstitutional. Even if they did get around that if the us abandoned Berne so would everybody else and you can bet your arse the MPAA will never let that happen.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I should apply the same set of rules to everyone first because that's the first fundamental basis of fairness. Is there any logical reason my stuff should be protected and not theirs? Maybe there is and maybe there isn't, but "mine should be protected because it's mine, theirs shouldn't because it's theirs" doesn't make any sense.
Secondly, unintended consequences. Suppose we formulate the rule that "anything which describes functionality can not be protected " in order to not protect Oracle's interests. That rule is going to effect thousands of other situations, now and in the future. We don't know what situations it might effect- it might have major negative effects on an organization I like, such as Apache or the Linux foundation. If you can't copyright something, that means you can't apply the GPL or other open-source license to it. I should be careful to support good rules because the rules make sense, not because the new rule will allow my favored part to win this one dispute. A bad rule will likely have far more significant bad consequences later.
That's an interesting thing to think about - any exceptions on copyright designed to prohibit restrictive licensing will equally prohibit CCL and BSD licensing. Either the author controls the licensing or they don't. I like having the right to license my work under GPLv2.
> the court has to decide whether copyright protection should cover APIs.
It is perhaps worth noting that it is the job of Congress, not the courts, to decide what the law SHOULD be. The court's job is to decide whether the wording Congress used covers this case or not. Not whether it SHOULD cover this API, but whether it DOES.
it is the job of Congress, not the courts
Historically, free culture advocates have looked to the courts because they have been perceived as less subject to influence from the MAFIAA's money than Congress. The congressional record for October 1998 (when CTEA and DMCA passed both houses unanimously) shows that both political parties with a chance of getting elected to the U.S. House and Senate favor expansion of the scope of exclusive rights under copyright. So what should voters do? MayDay PAC didn't do so hot in 2014.
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).
You have a fairly well-written (if lengthy) post, but it is based on the assumption that the law should be consistent. However, pretty much every law has exceptions added. e.g. murder has self-defence and (in some jurisdictions) euthanasia, copyright has fair use, etc.
I consider APIs to be the digital equivalent of forms. You submit a form to a department that accepts it, and you get another form back. The layout of the form (which sections are on which pages, whether you have boxes or grids of bubbles) affects the efficiency with which the form may be processed.
Forms are not copyrightable, for many of the same reasons that APIs should not be copyrightable.
From Wikipedia:
Copyright protects artistic expression. Copyright does not protect useful articles, or objects with some useful functionality. The Copyright Act states:
A “useful article” is an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information. An article that is normally a part of a useful article is considered a “useful article”.
“the design of a useful article, as defined in this section, shall be considered a pictorial, graphic, or sculptural work only if, and only to the extent that, such design incorporates pictorial, graphic, or sculptural features that can be identified separately from, and are capable of existing independently of, the utilitarian aspects of the article.”[16]
However, many industrial designers create works that are both artistic and functional. Under these circumstances, Copyright Law only protects the artistic expression of such a work, and only to the extent that the artistic expression can be separated from its utilitarian function (what courts call "conceptual separability"). If the aesthetic aspects cannot be separated from the functional aspects, copyright protection is not available.
It can be difficult to gauge whether the artistic aspects of a work can be separated from its useful aspects. Courts often rely on the Denicola test, which asks whether the artistic design was significantly influenced by functional considerations. If so, copyrightability depends on the extent to which the work reflects the artistic expression inhibited by functional considerations. As discussed by Judge Oakes:
Copyrightability "ultimately should depend on the extent to which the work reflects artistic expression uninhibited by functional considerations." To state the Denicola test in the language of conceptual separability, if design elements reflect a merger of aesthetic and functional considerations, the artistic aspects of a work cannot be said to be conceptually separable from the utilitarian elements. Conversely, where design elements can be identified as reflecting the designer's artistic judgment exercised independently of functional influences, conceptual separability exists.[17]
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
In other words:
The duly elected representatives of the public who are Constitutionally charged with making these decisions all think you're wrong. Liberal or conservative, everybody says you're wrong. So you find the only way to get what you want is to find an appointed official willing to exceed and abuse the power they are granted, to violate the Constitutional form of government by legislating from the bench as tiny tyrants.
When that becomes your strategy, you're doing it wrong.
You claim that the courts are the incorrect venue and Congress is the correct venue. But the House and Senate have proven themselves to be representatives-in-name-only. What should the people do when entrenched special interests block their efforts to duly elect representatives who will do the job of representing the people's views on issues?
With just the API, you've got _nothing_.
Except nobody with a brain is making that claim.
Agreed.
Google and Oracle were negotiating what the price would be for Google to copy what they did, and those negotiations were around $100 million. Google had three choices - pay $100 million, fight this lawsuit, or use another language such as Python, which has a BSD-style license. Google decided it was worth fighting this suit rather than using Python (or any of 100 other open languages). The fact that using the Java API rather than the Python API was worth fighting this lawsuit about shows that it was valuable.
When everybody, liberals and conservatives, think I'm wrong, the first thing I do is double check - I might actually be wrong. If I could be right more than half the time, I'd go to Vegas or Wall Street and come home a billionaire.
After double and triple checking, if I'm actually right than at that point I should have clear, objective proof that I'm right. I had to prove to myself that everyone else is wrong, so I've got solid evidence now, right? So I start showing that evidence to the electorate and to the elected. I post it on my congressman's Facebook wall, I post it on Slash, and I encourage the electorate to vote in lawmakers who will make right decisions.
If the copyrightable APIs that you desire existed at the time then Linux could never well have come into existence and we would only have proprietary Unix which would have never would have taken off like Linux has since the primary attraction of Linux is the open source nature of it.
What?
Linux ate proprietary unix's lunch.... which could not have happened unless proprietary unix had a lunch to eat. They had already taken off.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
That's a very interesting idea. I wonder what kind of responses that would get, if asked of thoughtful people. Not exactly what I had in mind, but very interesting.
I'll give you an example of something I did and try to apply it to your scenario. I wondered, are the policies of the democrats or those of the republicans better for the economy? I had an "opinion" (a guess), and I wanted to know what was actually better. We've tried both, so what would be an objective way to measure them and see which have worked better? I decided to chart economic growth under D presidents and under R presidents. I figured the president proposes and signs a budget for the next year, and the effects of that budget may not be fully felt for a couple of years, so accurate results needed some sort of lag factor. I decided I'd look at budget years, which are one year later than when they take office and leave office. In other words, Bush II would get the blame (or credit) for 2009, because he signed the 2009 budget. Obama's credit or blame would start with his first budget, 2010. Note that I did NOT look at the numbers before deciding on what criteria would be fair. I had no idea what the economic growth numbers for 2004 were, but Bush II was in office at that time, so he'd get the credit or blame for whatever happened in 2004. In other words, I chose criteria that I thought would give the right answer, not criteria that would support my opinion/guess. I did this back in 2007, and here is the chart:
http://bettercgi.com/tmp/econo...
Of course the 2008 mortgage crash happened soon after.
So to apply that to your question, "do extremely long terms of copyright promote the progress of the arts and sciences?" You and I would probably guess "no". I bet there are some countries with short copyright terms, and we know there are some countries with long terms. Perhaps we could compare countries with short copyright vs countries with long copyright. Now we just need an objective, numerical measurement of "promote the progress of the arts and sciences". I can't think of a good one of the top of my head; perhaps you can. The best I can think of would be index of several numbers:
Nobel prizes received
Scientific progress should cause economic progress, so economic growth is an indirect measure.
???
I'd think we'd want to decide ahead of time how to weight those measurements, then put the numbers into Excel and click the button to generate the chart. If we do that, we'd then be able to make statements like:
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generated 40% more Nobel prize winning scientific advancements per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years generate 25% more literature per capita
Countries with copyright terms less than 20 years have economic growth 3% higher on average.
If you happen to do any such analysis, I'd be very interested in seeing the results. Only if you choose the criteria before knowing what the results will be, though - anyone can cherry pick statistics to support any conclusion they want.
I bet there are some countries with short copyright terms, and we know there are some countries with long terms. Perhaps we could compare countries with short copyright vs countries with long copyright.
The incorporation of the Berne Convention into TRIPS reduces the usable variance between existing countries in this respect. No WTO member is allowed to have a copyright term shorter than 50 years after the end of the Gregorian calendar year in which the last surviving author died.
Good points. How is copyright for any computer software then justified, at least for most software that is intended to be a "useful" tool, like Microsoft Word?
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I said:
That's only one element of whether or not it's protectable under copyright, but it's the claim someone made and I responded to.
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, we then have to ask what other attributes are required for something to be protectable.
Your reply:
You're implicitly assuming the claim in question: whether or not an API is "property", i.e., protected by copyright.
Reading comprehension problem? I explicitly stated, not once but twice, that the fact that it's valuable not settle the question of whether it's protectable. It fully answers, and only answers, the assertion made above that it's worthless and "_nothing_".
That's actually a rather interesting question.
As with many things in law, it's the result of historical precedent (aka legacy code).
Historically, computer programs were not effectively protected by copyrights because computer programs were not viewed as a fixed, tangible object: object code was viewed as a utilitarian good produced from source code rather than as a creative work. Due to lack of precedent, this outcome was reached while deciding how to handle copyright of computer programs. The Copyright Office attempted to classify computer programs by drawing an analogy: the blueprints of a bridge and the resulting bridge compared to the source code of a program and the resulting executable object code. This analogy caused the Copyright Office to issue copyright certificates under its "Rule of Doubt".
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S...
So basically, software is copyrightable because blueprints are copyrightable, and later legislation was passed to codify this (and legislation doesn't need to be well reasoned or justified, merely politically tenable).
This then leads to the question of why blueprints are copyrightable.
"Consistent with other provisions of the Copyright Act and copyright regulations, . . . protection [of architectural works] does not extend to standard features, such as common windows, doors, and other stable building components."[27] As architect Michael Graves explained, copyright protection covers only the "poetic language" of an architectural work, which includes those parts of the design that are "responsive to issues external to the building, and incorporates the three-dimensional expression of the myths and rituals of society". It does not cover "internal language", which includes those parts of the design that are "intrinsic to the building in its most basic form – determined by its pragmatic, constructional, and technical requirements."[33] Thus, for example, individual elements that are driven by function are not copyrightable, including the presence of doors and windows or those elements required by building codes. Accordingly, architectural designs must be analyzed to determine the scope of their functionality.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...
So basically, architecture is a combination of art and functional aspects, and only the artistic elements were ever intended to be covered. The problem is that because the judiciary (in most cases) don't understand programming, they are unable to distinguish between them adequately.
IMO, computer programs in general should never have been considered to have an artistic element (and I say that as someone who appreciates beautiful code). A building may be said to have artistic elements because it serves two purposes: a functional one (to provide shelter), and an artistic one (to look good). With the exception of examples in textbooks (which are copyrightable independently of this), code is almost never written to look good, merely to serve a functional purpose. While it may be beautiful, that it not it's primary purpose. They should have been regarded as purely mechanical, and covered by patent law instead.* At this point in time though, it is likely impossible to fix that flaw, given how disruptive it would be.
* I think that software patents should exist, but not in their current form. While computer programs are mathemathical in nature, so are many other patentable creations. For example, the negative feedback amplifier was well-deserving of a patent (given how revolutionary it was at the time), but each of the components in that circuit could be well-defined mathematically. If the requirements for a patent were enforced properly (i.e. novelty/obviousness and the limitation to an implementation, as opposed to a goal/idea), then they would actually be useful.
Most human behaviour can be explained in terms of identity.
A pity, really. In my eyes, the language of the last paragraph would be wonderfully disingenuous, if it had been an intentional attempt to attain its actual impact.
Okay, if you prefer we ignore the first paragraph and pretend that only I wrote the last paragraph. Let's see what the last paragraph says:
Knowing that it is in fact something of value, WE THEN HAVE TO ASK WHAT OTHER ATTRIBUTES ARE REQUIRED FOR SOMETHING TO BE PROTECTABLE. What I try to avoid listening to is what my preference of outcome is for this particular case. Great cases make bad law. ...
You're just really not on your A game today, are you? Or, perhaps, you really want to Oracle to lose, but can't think of any better reason than because "I don't like Oracle". I don't like Oracle either, but that's a really crapy way to set national policy, policy that will affect many, many other situations.
Looks like we turned down the wrong path a few decades ago...
When Lessig argued "Eldred vs. Ashcroft" there was some point where the justices said, essentially, well no one has ever complained about copyright extensions before in terms of that being a taking something of value from the public (breaking the previous bargain struck at the time the work was produced), so extensions must be OK. That was probably not true, but Lessig did not have much of an answer for that. My memory of that may be a bit fuzzy, but I think that was the gist of an important point in the case as far as precedent.
More craziness and the law regarding the "owners" of so many copyrights these days:
http://www.ratical.org/corpora...
" In 1886, . . . in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that a private corporation is a person and entitled to the legal rights and protections the Constitutions affords to any person. Because the Constitution makes no mention of corporations, it is a fairly clear case of the Court's taking it upon itself to rewrite the Constitution.
Far more remarkable, however, is that the doctrine of corporate personhood, which subsequently became a cornerstone of corporate law, was introduced into this 1886 decision without argument. According to the official case record, Supreme Court Justice Morrison Remick Waite simply pronounced before the beginning of arguement in the case of Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company that:
"The court does not wish to hear argument on the question whether the provision in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws, applies to these corporations. We are all of opinion that it does."
The court reporter duly entered into the summary record of the Court's findings that:
"The defendant Corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourteen Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, which forbids a State to deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."
Thus it was that a two-sentence assertion by a single judge elevated corporations to the status of persons under the law, prepared the way for the rise of global corporate rule, and thereby changed the course of history.
The doctrine of corporate personhood creates an interesting legal contradiction. The corporation is owned by its shareholders and is therefore their property. If it is also a legal person, then it is a person owned by others and thus exists in a condition of slavery -- a status explicitly forbidden by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution. So is a corporation a person illegally held in servitude by its shareholders? Or is it a person who enjoys the rights of personhood that take precedence over the presumed ownership rights of its shareholders? So far as I have been able to determine, this contradiction has not been directly addressed by the courts. "
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
What is being argued is this:
return_val function_name(args...);
should not be copyrightable.
The implementation is and no one is arguing otherwise.
You cum dumpsters need to go back to 4chan