If You Can Copyright an API, What Else Can You Copyright?

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/05/api-copyright/

by apievangelist • 14 years ago

59 33 14 years ago

wired.com

nerdfiles3• 14 years ago

1. Music, etc (anything that can be formally described by a markup language)

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_))

nerdfiles3• 14 years ago

It's not clear to me why you're downvoting, each of these components bypasses the "do not contain innovative technology that should be protected from competitors" feature.

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.

sunir11• 14 years ago

Look up U.S. Copyright law and the case history on each of the suggestions you made. It looks like you may be surprised.

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.

roguecoder• 14 years ago

1. Phone numbers that spell words

2. Order Forms

3. Login Screens

4. Diner order slang

5. Hand signals used on the stock exchange floor

sunir11• 14 years ago

To assuage your fears or maybe exacerbate them:

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.

FrancescoRizzi• 14 years ago

My vote goes to browser vendor prefixes (eg: -webkit-make-awesome-coffee)

jjacobson• 14 years ago

I assumed we were talking about Java library APIs (like Hash, List, etc). Is this over REST style HTTP calls instead?

freehunter• 14 years ago

The legal debate is over Java APIs. The broader debate is over all APIs, since the ruling would be very unlikely to specify one single language. If Java APIs are copyrightable, all APIs are copyrightable.

billybob2• 14 years ago

If I had to explain the issue at stake here, I'd do it this way.

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?

sunir11• 14 years ago

Except that isn't a good analogy. It's much more like copyrighting the Burger King menu, which is the interface to ordering services from Burger King.

By the way, you can copyright restaurant menus.

smokeyj• 14 years ago

> Except that isn't a good analogy.

Why is that? If an API can be copyrighted why not a protocol?

billybob2• 14 years ago

It depends on what's considered an API, and that would be a question settled by courts. If a judge decides that someone owns RESTful APIs, every Rails app on the planet will infringe that.

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.

adnam2• 14 years ago

Entirely wrong analogy. The order counter is the interface, and the menu is the documentation.

ajross2• 14 years ago

By the way: you can only copyright the expression of the menu. You cannot copyright the food. If someone wants to offer a straight up clone of the Whopper(tm), there's nothing Burger King can do (though trademark law would of course prevent them from calling it a "Whopper").

noonespecial• 14 years ago

The problem is that there really isn't a good analogy for this. Its not the menu, or the counter. Its more like going up the the counter, reading the menu, placing the order, going into the restaurant, there being a restaurant in the first place, etc. It regresses away from you as fast as you can analogize until you end up at machine code clicked in with binary switches and some nitwit telling you he "owns" the op-codes.

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.

pmjordan• 14 years ago

What about hardware registers such as the layout for memory-mapped I/O? You know, "write value X to byte offset Y to switch the device into state Z."

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...

sunir11• 14 years ago

No, because that is an idea and not a specific, fundamental expression of an idea. Only a specific software is copyrightable.

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]

ajross2• 14 years ago

A register interface (the VGA registers, let's say) is not a "specific, fundamental expression on an idea"? Say what? The register interface is (quite literally!) a physical machine that implements the idea. It's much more concrete than any piece of software ever could be.

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.

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

IIRC The last version of Sun's 'ls' command used every upper and lower case character as an option flag.

Oracle now owns Sun and so has copyright on every upper and lower case letter ( at least when used as an option flag)

sunir11• 14 years ago

That's not correct. Consider this comparable example following your logic:

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.

excuse-me4• 14 years ago

Wait till they get a US lawyer !

If You Can Copyright an API, What Else Can You Copyright?

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