That is what I don't understand about people who argue that APIs should be copyrightable. It's like they don't see where the end is.
The reason competitors want to copy an API is because it's inherently necessary for compatibility. That need has nothing to do with how good the API is. It exists even if the API is terrible.
And APIs all chain together.
General Electric makes steam turbines. Your power company uses them to generate electricity. If GE (by analogy) controls the API then all power plants on the same grid have to use GE turbines. Your house connects to that grid, so you have to use a GE breaker panel in your house. It has its own API, so you also have to use all GE appliances.
If you want to charge your Macbook or iPhone at home then you had better hope that GE has a deal with Apple, and that they don't cancel it when GE enters the computing market. When they do you'll need a GE phone which will need a GE wireless carrier that will only serve GE websites. Now you can't buy anything from Amazon because you can't get there from here, you have to buy it from GE, and they only sell GE products. And so it goes.
Who are the people signing up for that world?
The other way to look at it is that people want to copy an API to extract value from a market or ecosystem someone else did the hard work of creating, without investing the resources into creating their own.
And why is that supposed to be a problem? You would prefer the world where Apple needs GE's permission to sell an iPhone that can charge from a GE power outlet?
Ecosystems don't need owners.
I feel like I'm arguing against the position that you should have to service your car at the dealership because otherwise the independent mechanic who does the work is somehow illicitly expropriating value from the OEM. How is it that that has come to be a right of the OEM?
So Ford makes the Mustang, I make after-market brake pads for the Mustang and therefore I have to use the same mounting interface as the Ford pads. I also make callipers and axles and so on; all the parts you need to repair your Mustang.
In theory if I really make all the parts then I can put them together and get a whole car with no OEM parts. But notice that nobody really does this. Because if you're capable of making the whole car yourself, you no longer care if the parts are compatible with Ford parts, you just become Toyota.
What you might see is people selling "whole cars" which are 75% Ford OEM parts and 25% something new and different, like the Shelby Mustang. But it's not clear how that should be something bad.
> I think with API's: you can copyright the header, but not the ABI. I.e. nothing prevents you from making an LLVM module that exposes the same interface as what the header compiles down to.
That's kind of weird. The header and the ABI aren't separable. You can decompile the ABI back into the header. Does it really make sense to be able to copyright something which is just a deterministic transformation of something you can't copyright?
I'm not sure I'm with you on type names though. If the application being linked against the API was compiled using a header with different type names then the application would have to be rewritten to use the other type names. It would break source code interoperability. (And you can infer the type names from the ABI given the source and binary of an application compiled using the original header, without actually having the header.)
That's an interesting point in more than one way. Forgive me if I'm stating the obvious but Mercedes is a high-end car manufacturer while Mazda chiefly serves cars to the middle-class and in the case of the Mazda 2 - this generation's People's Car. By aggressively protecting designs then only the rich (well, Mercedes isn't super high-end but it's an aspirational brand) can adopt new technologies, which means the markets for new technologies are tied to the speed at which wealth increases (that includes the rate at which adoption at the high-end subsidises the cost at the low-end). It stunts the speed at which we advance collectively.
The entire purpose of copyright and patent is to promote progress. It has transformed into a capitalistic weapon that corporations use to muscle competition and slow progress.
So they don't limit access to knowledge or technology, they just limit commercializing of knowledge or technology. Because technology that can't be commercialized (and therefore obtained or used) is what people want?
If someone has a patent on X then there is no competition for the production of X, so the patentee can charge higher prices, so fewer people will be able to afford X.
If someone has a patent on X then there is a greatly reduced incentive for anyone else to improve X, because the original patentee can prohibit you from selling your improvement unless you give them an arbitrarily large share of your profits.
"Without license."
> If someone has a patent on X then there is no competition for the production of X, so the patentee can charge higher prices, so fewer people will be able to afford X.
Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.
> If someone has a patent on X then there is a greatly reduced incentive for anyone else to improve X, because the original patentee can prohibit you from selling your improvement unless you give them an arbitrarily large share of your profits.
Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.
"Without license" is implied by "limit" -- that's the limitation.
> Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.
Nobody said anything about "more and more expensive as time goes on." As soon as there is one necessary patent the seller can charge the monopoly price. Adding more patents doesn't change the monopoly price (though it does add transaction overhead that comes out of everyone's margins).
You can't claim that the monopoly price is not higher than the competitive price would be in the absence of patents.
> Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.
The damages a court would award isn't a lower bound because the patentee can request an injunction that prevents you from selling the product until you pay them whatever they demand.
What are you even trying to argue anyway? That lawsuits and license fees don't cost money? That having to pay money isn't a disincentive to do something? That limiting competition doesn't increase prices?
Again, what is limited by the license is the commercialization, not access to the knowledge or the technology. These are completely different things. You can find out all about a patented technology, and even implement it for non-commercial (e.g. research) purposes. You simply can't attempt to make money off it without a license.
> As soon as there is one necessary patent the seller can charge the monopoly price. Adding more patents doesn't change the monopoly price (though it does add transaction overhead that comes out of everyone's margins).
The major flaw in this argument is that these thousands of patents are owned by many hundreds of entities. There is no monopoly". As a counter-point, all you need to look at is the sub-$50, contract-free smartphones available in the US.
> The damages a court would award isn't a lower bound because the patentee can request an injunction that prevents you from selling the product until you pay them whatever they demand.
1. Injunctions are not always available, are not automatic and you have to convince the ITC, a separate court, to give you one.
2. Injunctions have been very hard to get in the US since the eBay decision.
> What are you even trying to argue anyway? That lawsuits and license fees don't cost money? That having to pay money isn't a disincentive to do something? That limiting competition doesn't increase prices?
I'm arguing that all those concerns, while making sense in theory, are not necessarily supported by empirical evidence, especially given the vibrant smartphone industry despite being rife with patents and lawsuits. As such it is not clear if those are greater or less than the benefits provided by patents.
> commercializing of knowledge or technology without license.
This pretty much fits the definition of "limiting access to knowledge/technology" directly. Free access and commercialization of knowledge / technology (with some exceptions, like nuclear weapons) are good for progress, good for consumers, good for humanity... but bad for the commercializers, hence they try to limit it.
But even with this small number of elements there are many differences between Gibson guitars and Fender guitars.
The obvious difference is the shape of the head. Gibsons tend to have a spade shaped head with three pegs each side. Fenders tend to have a scroll shaped head with all six pegs in a line.
The screen shots supplied in this thread are much harder to tell apart.
I think that's his point. The things you listed are the interface, and the differences lie in Gibson's and Fender's implementations of that specific interface.
There's a bunch of stuff to a spreadsheet, and the interface is how most users will access those features. When the interface is nearly identical it's a problem.
It's a bit more complicated here because Corel are apparently following MS instructions about how the interface should look.