Earlier quoted context omitted.
You seem to have misread what was being said, because you seem to be arguing against something that was explicitly stated to not be the case: > individual recipes are generally not copyrightable , but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable. (emphasis mine) The law understands that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And Java adds up a lot of…
> The law understands that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. My point is that "the whole" is the implementation of the Java standard library and the API is really still just the recipe. > It's also an interesting model case because it's inherently so very open, without (particularly pre-Jigsaw) a clearly demarcated dividing line between "API" and "implementation." The line is clear even if the language put…
"Whole" in the sense of "the whole is more than the sum of its parts" is not generally understood to imply the maximal possible scope in any given context. It's simply meant to meant to talk about how the identify an aggregation (of no particular scale) relates to the identities of its individual components.
Similarly, the API/not-API distinction is one that has to be made in contexts beyond just the relationship of function signatures to function implementations. Foo was declared as a public class, but was it meant for public consumption? Or is it intended for internal use, and was only declared public because, for practical reasons, it couldn't be declared package-private?
Moreover, there are certainly rational distinctions that could be drawn, but that does not mean that they are legally relevant. The issue at hand really doesn't have anything at all to do with how programmers understand things. The law is not what we think is right, the law is what is written in the books.