471–480 of 965 posts
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US copyright law and interpretation tends to get exported through trade deals and other forms of political and economic pressure.
While true, APIs have specifically not been copyrightable in the EU for some time, I'm not sure about the cad else in other countries and regions.
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I strongly agree with the outcome but the cost in the other direction is good API design is a creative process. If you sit down and design a kick-ass API for a year, another person who re-implements is inheriting that design, and its benefits, for free. I do wonder if another case will wind its way up one day where the defendant lifted the API not for interoperability but because it was a clean or clever interface. (…
The majority opinion cited precedent ( Feist ) that copyright is not intended to profit the creator. It's to advance the progress of arts and sciences. If someone copies your amazing API, that sucks for you, but it's not stopping the progress of arts and sciences.
Which of Breyer's clerks drafted this? They clearly understand many tech issues and I hope they find their place on some Federal circuit to herald an era of logic in tech law. "Google’s limited copying of the API is a transformative use. Google copied only what was needed to allow programmers to work in a different computing environment without discarding a portion of a familiar programming language. Google’s purpose…
It's interesting to me that they ruled that APIs are copyrightable, but that copying them is a fair use. In what circumstances would non-fair-use copyright then apply?
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
So if I copy the entire A volume of Encyclopedia Britannica, but leave B-Z alone, I'm good?
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For video and photography, there has to be a human element involved. A fixed, CCTV feed of a beach with a daily sunset is not copyrightable, nor is a non-human using a photo camera.
But a photographer who travels to the beach and sets out a camera on a tripod to capture a timelapse of the sunset DOES have copyright over those photos. What's the difference if they leave the camera there for longer? They still chose the placement and the angle and the lens. In either case, the camera's electronics are deciding the minutiae of the image acquisition.
For better or worse, the same arguments ( "API is copyrightable" ) is what was used in the past to prevent 98's Microsoft from doing embrace-extend-extinguish to Java with their "JavaVM with P/Invoke'd Win32 API". The idea in that case was that when you try to implement something identical to the Java language and standard library, it doesn't matter if you call it Java or "Visual J++"; you are still implementing Java…
I led the development of a large GUI app using J++ in the late 90s. This fear you describe is unwarranted. It's worth pointing out that the list of examples of "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" on the wikipedia page of that name [1] contains zero actual successful examples of it working. Perhaps you have noticed that you aren't reading this page in an ActiveX control. This is a boogeyman. Don't be afraid of it. [1]: http…
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I can recommend focusing on Justice Thomas' dissent, which contains a section related to this topic. I believe Justice Thomas agrees with your assessment, and he raises concern that the SCOTUS has essentially made APIs practically uncopyrightable (in that they will 100% of the time find that it's fair-use to use them). I actually disagree with him, but only in one sub-category: I think a SCOTUS ruling would be harder…
Justice Thomas wrote explicitly that he thought the majority blurred the lines between implementation and declaration. I think he's wrong by virtue of some disability to follow the winning argument logically. Clarence is sheer idiot.
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
> "Google copied approximately 11,500 lines of declaring code from the API, which amounts to virtually all the declaring code needed to call up hundreds of different tasks. Those 11,500 lines, however, are only 0.4 percent of the entire API at issue, which consists of 2.86 million total lines. In considering “the amount and substantiality of the portion used” in this case, the 11,500 lines of code should be viewed as…
Based on this court decision, it's apparently fair use to lift someone else's API and use it to jumpstart programmer familiarity with your product, if the author of the API previously tried to achieve success in that narrowly-construed, retroactively-interpreted exact same market segment and wasn't very successful.
I see a few things coming out of this. IP holder companies will become even more common: they will be used to hold copyright to one API and license it out to customers -- including independent companies that you would currently recognize as part of the same platform.
But because the IP holder does not provide an implementation and therefore does not 'compete' in a market segment, any unlicensed use of it is necessarily infringing: there's no innate functionality with which one can interoperate under the doctrine of fair use.