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Comment by lambdaone | Hacker News Reader

At last. It's time the whole would gets on board with open standards that are truly open, and there is explosive devopment going on in the world of new approaches to media production and distribution that this can only aid.

It's net-head vs. Bell-heads all over again, and one of the biggest reasons for the success of the IETF standards was the no-cost availability of all their standards.

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We need a SciHub for standards docs. Since APIs have been ruled incopyrightable in the US, building a library that implements the standard shouldn’t itself be illegal.

This will only increase innovation.

APIs have not been ruled uncopyrightable. The Supreme Court found that Google's use of the Java API's was fair use; fair use is specifically a defense against infringement of a copyrighted work.

There may be court cases in the future that determine what the boundaries on API reimplementation are that distinguish fair use from infringement. A future Supreme Court may well overturn Oracle v. Google. APIs are specific forms of unique expression, and the same functionality can be made available through different APIs. (See for example, OpenGL vs. Direct3D.) Typically these are the criteria used to determine what is eligible for copyright, and ruling APIs uncopyrightable absent a statutory carve-out exemption may well put the copyrightability of currently protected forms of expression in jeopardy.

But as things stand, the Oracle v. Google decision has only made the API-copyrightability decision more ambiguous, it has not settled the matter in favor of making APIs uncopyrightable.

You're right, fair use was the ruling. Thank you for the correction. In that case, would the implementation of a standard qualify? Feels like it would?

We need a SciHub for standards docs

LibGen?

Last time I checked (a few years ago), you had to pay some ridiculous price (230$ iirc) to view the SQL specification. SQL!

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