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Comment by pier25 | Hacker News Reader

IANAL... but it seems to me copyrighting an API instead of the actual implementation would be like trying to copyright the idea of "chair" or "wheel" which is not possible AFAIK.

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A better metaphor is probably to look at an API as a design blueprint. For instance a blueprint of a house. Describing in detail all the components that goes into creating the house, plumbing, electricity, rooms etc. Clearly it is a lot of work to come up with such a design.

In that analogy, Google used the blueprint at the level of "living room goes here; closet is next to the bathroom". They then redesigned the plumbing and electricity from scratch.

It's a literary work. It's copying the table of contents, but writing your own chapter text.

I fail to see how it's not copyrightable as such. It appears to be a collection of facts (the interface of the implementation). These are not copyrightable, unless it meets the following:

"the work must be a collection and assembly of pre-existing material, facts, or data; the work must contain the selection, coordination, or arrangement of those materials; and the work is created by virtue of the particular selection, coordination, or arrangement of an original work of authorship."

I can't see how "arrangement of those materials" and "virtue of the particular selection or arrangement" isn't obvious here?

Oracle is pursuing the path where this case is literally about the contents of text files with words, which are supposedly well defined and understood under copyright law.

A table of contents, stripped of editing, is generally not copyrightable as is. It falls under mere listings of ingredients or contents exemptions.

An API is more than a table of contents. When I write a method and give it a name and define what parameters it accepts, that is just as much part of the code as the inner workings of the method itself. I'm not a big fan of copyrighting in general but I am struggling to see understand how the code that defines an interface is separate from the rest of the code.

> It's copying the table of contents, but writing your own chapter text

That is a bit disingenuous. Using your analogy it would be the subject sentence of every paragraph in the book.

Not sure if that is great metaphor either. Blueprints describe everything, including implementation.

My understanding is that code is treated basically as a literary work [0] with copyrighting. So the API definition is a part of the codebase. I do not think the analogy to copyrighting an idea is applicable. Unless they are trying to separately just have a copyright on the API? If that is the case, I'm not even sure how it would have been filed?

[0] https://www.copyright.gov/eco/help-type.html

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