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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'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.
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.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
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.
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.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
> 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.
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.