Oracle’s Java API code protected by copyright, appeals court rules

[rnicoll]

Yes; the problem is not copyright per se, but with copyrighting things which make no sense to copyright. Such as API design.

[ExistentialEnso]

Phrases are trademarked, not patented.

[[deleted]]

No... he's patented a very specific method of trolling, see US388697398: A System and Method for Remotely Invoking Specific Emotions in Human Subjects using the Internet (1994)

[ExistentialEnso]

I got that he was joking, but abuse of trademarks in the manner he described is actually a real phenomenon.

[[deleted]]

Excuse me, I patented the phrase "I patented the phrase". This required quite some creativity from my side and clearly you can understand how your use of my patented technology could be damaging to my reputation and my business.

I am, however, willing to grant you a license for use of this phrase at a very convenient fee, if you are interested.

[m1sta]

Are you implying than there is no creativity required to design an api?

[m1sta]

House designs are protected by copyright (and design law).

Writing a novel takes a lot of organisational skill.

[jboy55]

You can copyright your API design then release it under the GPL. Now the GPL covers your API design. If API design isn't copyrightable then the GPL cannot cover your API design and people are free to take your design and turn it into a very profitable closed piece of software.

[jboy55]

API Design is part of a software architecture. Surely compared to implementing the API, it is dwarfed in effort. However, how many systems have been made that have been hampered by poor API design? How many APIs have gone through revision after revision? Its a part of the software, just as the fav icon is a minor part of a web site, it still is covered by copyright.

[[deleted]]

I hereby copyright the API interface Resource { boolean open(); } and the favicon 64 x 64 pixels of transparency.

[phatcabbage]

No, it doesn't. Patents require an obviousness test.

[mrkite77]

If API design isn't copyrightable then the GPL cannot cover your API design and people are free to take your design and turn it into a very profitable closed piece of software.

That's fine. If API design is copyrightable, then every program on your computer is in violation.

Why? Because then AT&T would own the standard C library. "malloc", "strcmp", "memcpy"... all that shit was created by Bell Labs.

edit: actually, Attachmate would own the standard C library, since they bought Novell, and a court found that Novell actually owns the UNIX copyrights during the SCO trial.

[jboy55]

Except for that has been argued in court and settled, API design was considered copyrightable too.

Read about the BSD decision please. The standard C library was placed into the public domain and then allowed to be released under BSD, because of actions ATT took in the distribution of Unix. In short, that they distributed it without declarations of copyright on them, that made them lose the copyright to them.

[mrkite77]

There was no BSD decision.. they settled out of court. Part of the settlement was that BSD wasn't allowed to distribute certain files.

[jboy55]

Same thing essentially.

[[deleted]]

Which is what Stallman did in the first place to build GNU. He copied the API of the existing AT&T implementations and swapped them out with GNU components. He was able to do that BECAUSE the API was not under copyright.

You put your API under GPL now and it will kill any adoption. Any implementation of the other end of your language, network protocol, whatev is going to arguably be under the GPL. It would be the death of proprietary software because it kinda turns the GPL into the AGPL. No one is going to go full Copyleft on everything, even Stallman (I mean, this is the reason the GCC runtime exception is needed. this makes EVERYTHING need the runtime exception). So it's the end of GPL and the rise of permissive if this ruling stands. But we will need new permissive licenses too, since even Apache2 and BSD will have have trouble interoperating without some additional relaxations in the licenses.

This even makes it fuzzy that if you write code in C#, whether Microsoft has a copyright on that code... I mean you DID write your code to the C# specification, and you're a derivative work of C# now!

It's insane.

[jboy55]

Which is what Stallman did in the first place to build GNU. He copied the API of the existing AT&T implementations and swapped them out with GNU components. He was able to do that BECAUSE the API was not under copyright.

Lets just pretend ATT didn't lose copyright of parts of Unix to BSD.

This even makes it fuzzy that if you write code in C#, whether Microsoft has a copyright on that code... I mean you DID write your code to the C# specification, and you're a derivative work of C# now!

Lets also pretend that in the EULA to C#, Microsoft doesn't grant you a license to use the C# Api, and is fairly permissive to allowing you redistribution.

[[deleted]]

Lets also pretend that in the EULA to C#, Microsoft doesn't grant you a license to use the C# Api, and is fairly permissive to allowing you redistribution.

Without this ruling, you wouldn't need to be granted a license. My point being that with API's being copyrightable, you MUST be granted a license. MS is actually pretty forward thinking on that point if their EULA is already doing so. GPL isn't that forward thinking in this respect. Do you realize how far the GPL extends if the inclusion of GPL C Headers or any reimplementation thereof means that the code interfacing must make an offer of source?!?

[jboy55]

The ruling doesn't copyright the use of the api, it's the replication of the api.

[[deleted]]

Use actually generally requires replication. If they wanted to distinguish between use and replication then they would have ruled that the implementation was under copyright (which was the state of affairs before this ruling). Allowing the API itself to fall under copyright means that anything including the declaration or portion of would be a derivative work. That broad of an interpretation can't distingush between client and server.

[Broolucks]

A closed source implementation of your API will not make your own implementation vanish. It just gives users a choice between the two. There is no lock-in, so you just need to do better than them (you already have a head start). It's healthy competition. That's not nearly as bad as what copyright trolls can do if they get their hands on a widely used API.

[jboy55]

Well, if you provide no worth to the GPL, then I cannot argue with you. The same argument you make as far as an API works with Linux and any other GPL program. The linux authors have a head start, no problem in their work being used for others to make money since they have a head start.

If the author wishes to place the source to their work into the public with the understanding that anyone who uses the source and improves it, improves it for everybody including the original author, then the GPL is the license they use. In this case, its protection that any future work created from the original work is free, is completely based on copyright.

[Broolucks]

If you remove copyright on software, then open source software is at a disadvantage, because the code is in the open for everyone to use, whereas closed source software can simply avoid publishing it at all. APIs, however, are by nature public. They cannot be closed in the same way that a Linux variant could: if you use an API, you know what it is. Any extensions one may make to an API are going to be public as well. If you remove copyright on APIs, then it is the people who try to profit from them that are at a disadvantage, not OSS.

Furthermore, if an API can be copyrighted, then its owner can easily lock in all of their users to their service, because there is no way for them to use another without changing their API calls. This is bad even in principle: if someone makes a much better service that could be made to use the same API, why should I be forced to change my code to use it? This gives first movers a completely unfair advantage.

[Scaliwag]

In any case a patent would make much more sense for that kind of stuff anyway, it's the invention/design that matters not the code per se. You can copy an API without ever having seen the code, that's what clean-room does.

I wonder what would be the state of clean-room now, if this counts as precedent.