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Comment by technofiend | Hacker News Reader

This is tricky because if you declare any API no matter how trivial copyrightable then the first guy to copyright a function to compute sqrt, tan, atan, etc wins. And if you can't copyright trivial interfaces then the question becomes where the line is drawn.

There's far more at stake than Oracle trying to squeeze money out of Google.

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I completely agree, but I don't really know what to do about it. Surely a document describing a useful software interface (GUI, CLI, API) is a creative work and takes effort to produce. Unless we just agree that it's a necessary exception for the purposes of interoperbility I'm not sure how I would argue that it shouldn't fall under copyright protection.

Copyright would apply to the documentation itself, or the published header files themselves, as works; it wouldn't apply to the API itself.

Mind you, Oracle was suing Google for using the header files themselves; since Google could have easily just typed up their own versions that did the same thing, it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement" case: they shipped something that was exactly from Oracle, rather than just paraphrasing it. Oracle was probably in the right to sue over that.

But re: APIs—there's much more well-resolved case-law for this, coming from the gaming vertical: games have copyright, but game designs (including things like their network protocols) do not. It has both pros (Microsoft can't use the Minecraft IP to sue Terraria or Factorio; people can advance AI by writing bots that play Starcraft) and cons (the iOS and Android stores being saturated with mechanical clones of each successful game) but it's very certainly "the way things are."

>it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement"

Do you know what the definition of plagiarism is? Google it, "copyright infringement" is listed as a synonym.

Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are different things. For example, it is possible to plagiarize something that is not copyrighted, and many forms of copyright infringement wouldn't fit the definition of plagiarism.

True, but the parent seems to think they wouldn't have been plagiarizing if they had "paraphrased" the declaring code so to speak, which makes the relationship here explicit. If they had paraphrased the declaring code, it would have been much harder to say they were infringing on copyright, but instead, they copied it verbatim.

Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.

> Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.

That seems an odd thing to say. A significant portion of academic writing is paraphrasing, with attribution. What is a review article, other than attributed paraphrasing?

With attribution, definitely ok, but some think paraphrasing is enough to make it wholly new. Hell, you can quote verbatim if you attribute.

I'm not 100% certain of all the details but isn't that exactly what Google tried, and failed, to assert originally? If I remember correctly, the 'fair use' argument only came up after Google lost on the 'can't copyright an interface' argument, and the real travesty here is not that Google are being denied fair use (because, you're right, it's not fair use), but that Oracle's copyright claim over the Java API ever held up at all.

There are two philosophies of copyright. One, that people/companies have a moral right to control their creative output, and the other, that copyright should be granted sparsely when it has a positive impact on society, such as promoting the writing of books.

Since APIs are a byproduct of software development, it is hard to see how it should be copyrightable under the second stance, but easy for the first.

Perhaps granting copyright, but setting precedence that basically any use is fair use, is a good compromise.

> Surely a document describing a useful software interface (GUI, CLI, API) is a creative work and takes effort to produce.

Sure, but they didn't copy said document. Comments, documentation etc. were not used. Implementation was not used.

The things that were the same were the method signatures and side effects. Is that copyright? I would argue its clearly not.

Someone should write a program that generates all possible function names and argument types and declares them copyrighted, then release them all to the public.

You could, by a similar method, generate all possible images but that doesn't mean you would be able to copyright them all. The creative element would become the act of identifying specific images within your set with artistic merit -- those would be copyrightable.

Nope, there is no "merit test" for copyright. Copyright attaches when the creation is fixed in tangible form.

You're right. Sorry, merit is a loaded term in copyright discussions. I don't mean that they would have to argue that their choice of images has artistic merit, but that the artist would probably think it does to pick it out of the billions.

It's not a "merit test", it's just "these are the ones the artist chose".

Copyright attaches to creative works when they are fixed in tangible form. An exhaustive list of every combination of colors in order is not creative.

That list wouldn't be copyrightable, since it contains no creative elements.

After the original trial verdict was overturned by the appeals court, I joked about copyrighting every single signature I could think of for print functions so that I could claim royalties from virtually every program in existent.

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