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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."
"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
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.
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.
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.
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...
http://spectrum.ieee.org/compu...
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...
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...
"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...
"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...
""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
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.