Hacker News Reader

Comment by luminaobscura | Hacker News Reader

as far as i understand,

both sides agree on: - you cannot copyright language - you can copyright implementation.

so all comes down to: - can you copyright APIs ?

Standard APIs that are shipped with the programming language, are part of the language ... just like English words are part of English, the language.

Oracle tries to draw a boundary between the language and the APIs, but there is no boundary to be drawn.

Google's slide said that the API is just using nouns and verbs. I think this is not a good defense, the book I wrote is just nouns and verbs, and we know you can't copy it.

but Google can write a different book with using the same nouns and verbs, which they did

Oracle will say it's the same book, there are always grey areas. You can't copyright a love story between a boy and a girl, but you can copyright a particular book on it. So if the API is copyrightable, then even though it was implemented differently, isn't it using their property?

No, Microsoft wrote a 'different book' -- .NET

What Google did was remove a chapter here and there and add a couple of their own chapters -- in this book analogy, clearly copyright infringement.

The actual quotes used in the slides is "you form an API using those parts of speech in the same way I'd write a technical paper using, you know, nouns, verbs, objects, so on." In other words, you couldn't copyright java.lang package name itself (an adjective say) but you could copyright the collection of everything in it (as like technical paper).

I'm astounded that this is in Google's slides. Slide 12 basically says the Java API, taken as a whole, is copyrightable.

The analogy is better if you use dictionary.

The language must have words with meaning (API specification).

A dictionary is a book of words and their definition (API implementation). You can have two different dictionaries from the same language. They both have their copyrights, and they don't infringe each other copyrights.

Harmony's Java API implementation (used in Android) and JDK's Java API implementation are just two different dictionaries for the same language (Java API specification).

You will use a dictionary (API implementation) of a language - its symbols and words and the rules between them - (programming Language and API specification) to write a book (programs).

Both dictionary and book are subject to copyright. The language is not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com