If You Can Copyright an API, What Else Can You Copyright?
wired.com
wired.com
Imagine you go into a fast-food restaurant. "I'd like a burger," you say to the cashier. You get a burger. The next day, you go to a different restaurant. "I'd like a taco," you say. They bring you a taco.
Just then, a lawyer bursts in. "I'm sorry, but my client, the burger restaurant, has a copyright on that. No other restaurant is allowed to accept orders in the form of 'I'd like a(n) X'".
Would that be crazy?
APIs are the computer equivalent. If you go to a blog and request a page like 'someblog.com/posts', then you go to a movie theater's site and request a page like 'moviesite.com/movies', you wouldn't think of those two actions as having anything in common. Sure, both sites use a url like '/items' to serve up that kind of item. Why wouldn't they?
But if the courts rule that APIs can be copyrighted, the movie site might either have to license the right to have URLs like '/movies', or do something else.
What else? Whatever they can think of - and think of it first. Because the race will be on to copyright every imaginable scheme. '/show/me/movies' and '/movies=all' and '/3932939' will soon be taken. Even if they can come up with a new convention, they'll likely be in court for the right to use it.
Does that sound good for consumers - ostensibly the ones whom intellectual property laws should benefit? Does it sound good for new businesses who don't have legal departments?
Or would it be crazy?
By the way, you can copyright restaurant menus.
Why is that? If an API can be copyrighted why not a protocol?
[edit: iphone typo]
Shall I compare thee to a JPEG header, thou are more fair and ...
The main thing is there has to be a specific thing that is copyable. Or more accurately, (U.S.) copyright protects against copying an original work of authorship fixed in tangible medium of expression.
A protocol is not a set of questions and answers, but a mechanism to generate responses. It's literally a machine. Its output changes with every input. Therefore, it's patentable, but is it copyrightable?
You can copyright the software underlying it. You can copyright a transcript of a session of the protocol. You can copyright a technical specification of the protocol.
But because a protocol fails several qualities of "an original work of authorship fixed in a tangible medium of expression", it is not copyrightable.
An interesting and overlapping area are generative works like board games. Take for instance Magic the Gathering or Settlers of Catan. Are they copyrightable?
The answer is more interesting than you might think.
A game is not copyrightable.
* http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html * http://boardgamegeek.com/blogpost/2700/intellectual-property...
However, the rules, board game, cards, etc. are copyrightable. Does that mean I could make a million billion dollars selling Pioneers of Penzance by directly knocking off Settlers of Catan? No! If the new rules, board, cards are substantially similar to Settlers of Catan, I'd be in trouble.
Even if you're right, and the copyright applied only to a specific list of API endpoints and actions, it would still be a nightmare for startups. You couldn't release anything without legal vetting.
It was possible at one point to patent RESTful APIs, but no longer.
It's not clear to me how declaring APIs copyrightable impacts a startup in the slightest, except of course that their own APIs are copyrightable and they will be prevented from parasitically cloning competitors' APIs.
P.S. There is in fact an company who has cloned Basecamp's API so they could instantly work with all the Basecamp Add-ons and more easily convert Basecamp customers to their own.
Is the source code the software or the compiled binary? What is copyrightable? One or both?
Is an API the source code, the compiled binary, or the running process of the software? What is copyrightable?
Computer software is considered copyrightable. Source code and binaries are both copyrightable.
Even if you didn't copy the source code, if your software is "substantially similar" to another copyrighted software, you could violate their copyrights. The argument is whether or not an API is a substantial part of some computer software.
In this case, it's the Java libraries. Since the Java libraries only value is the Java APIs, I believe it would be hard to argue that copying the Java APIs did not violate Sun's (and now Oracle's) copyright.
That's why I think that it's very frightening that Google has to rely on this argument to defend itself rather than, say, the statue of limitations on copyright or, better, an explicit license grant from Sun.
The source code is the creative work, and the compiled binary is a mechanical transformation of the work, and thus both are covered by the same copyright. I don't see how this is mysterious.
> Is an API the source code, the compiled binary, or the running process of the software?
It is none of those. The I in API stands for interface — that is, it's an abstract description of the things a library provides and how you interact with them. The source code, the compiled binary and the running process are concrete implementations, not abstract interfaces.
> Since the Java libraries only value is the Java APIs
What on earth? Are you really saying the only value of the Java standard library is the names and type signatures of the packages and methods, and not the actual functionality they provide? The library could actually not implement any of the methods and it would be just as valuable?
I have to assume you are just very confused about what the word "API" means.
Some ideas in computing are just hard to put into real world analogies. This is one of those ideas. Trying to apply some sort of IP law to it is just a plain bad idea. People who code know this instinctively, people who don't are just going to have to trust the people who do, or switch the damn things off altogether.
If that's copyrightable, the Linux kernel is basically one big copyright violation, because I'm sure a lot of the device driver writers weren't given a license...
Is the portion of software that "write[s] value X to byte offset Y to switch the device into state Z," copyrightable?
Well, it would depend on how unique the source code was, such as pushing a VGA card into Mode-X or making an Arduino do something spectacular. But only that specific source code would be copyrightable.
Given the fundamental nature of the idea, the copyright likely won't stop you from writing another piece of software along similar lines, though someone may patent the idea of controlling an Arduino to steer a hovercraft and prevent you from going to market.
[edit: spelling of Mode-X]
I re-read that post several times to be sure. I honestly think you're managed to get your head into a space where you're confusing up with down. This is just plain wrong, and shockingly so.
The question was whether the fundamental operation of a von Neumann machine was copyrightable. No, it isn't. That's just an idea, not a specific expression.
An example I grew up with was convincing a VGA adapter to go into 320x240 mode. That was a rather clever hack. The original source code to do it was copyrightable. He published it in Dr. Dobb's journal in 1991 and then later in his own book.
2. Order Forms
3. Login Screens
4. Diner order slang
5. Hand signals used on the stock exchange floor
2, 3 are already copyrightable. (Rightly so.)
4, 5 are not copyrightable because they aren't fixed expressions in a tangible medium. 1 isn't copyrightable because a phone number is a fact.
2. DNA sequences
3. Anything subject to algebraic expression
4. Proofs and Arguments (_Paley's_ Divinewatcher, _Descarte's_ Mind-Body Problem, _Nozick's_ Experience Machine, _Gödel's_ Incompleteness Proof)
5. Programmatic Techniques for manipulating one's own brain
6. Expression of physical laws
7. E=MC^2, Gravity, etc. (assuming God is a "Programmer of Nature")
8. Personality types (fitting analytic descriptions; Analytic/Description Psychology, Jungian psychology, "narrative psychology"), because eventually:
9. Neural Networks, and the like
10. The Universe itself
(11. Historically rooted chess strategies (the notation as a historical marker of creativity in time))
(12. Just about anything that might exist within the domain of W3C Provenance)
((13. Anything conceptually dependent on _techne_))
You're being unfair with these downvotes, and perhaps a bit uncouth since no general idea, or specific idea, as to why it's being downvoted is presented. Each of these is innovative in some way, and we can see a predictable trend where we will first assume that the problem is unique (whatever the API, etc tries to solve) and then "give due diligence" to creativity/labor where necessary.
If you're taking this post as a "troll" attempt or a "joke," the joke's on you. This is what I truly believe, and I'm fairly, genuinely answering the question.
You're downvoting because of the content of my thought.
Cheers.
I am tempted to go through them all myself, but it is less fun and may make you feel better about the state of copyright if you do the research yourself.
Two for free: music is already copyrightable; DNA is not copyrightable.
I'm talking about music as a expressed through a markup language. So I'm thinking the "concept" of a concept album can be copyrighted IF APIs are copyrightable. What kind of metadata would it possess? Does the author of the music have the ability to extend that metadata?
Oracle now owns Sun and so has copyright on every upper and lower case letter ( at least when used as an option flag)
The Oxford English Dictionary has a copyright on the dictionary of every English word, and therefore Oxford Press has a copyright on every English expression.