I'm not suggesting Amazon would or even should defend their API from Oracle. Just making the counter argument that while not defending your copyrights doesn't l

I'm not suggesting Amazon would or even should defend their API from Oracle. Just making the counter argument that while not defending your copyrights doesn't lead to a point where you can lose your copyright on something (Which can happen with trademarks) but purposely not defending them can lead to a point where you have inadvertently created an implied license causing headaches later down the road if you did decide to defend them at a later date. For an example, lets just say for the sake of argument Amazon did decide to defend their API from Oracle's implementation and take action. Oracle could use as a defence (But prob not their only line of defense) that "That Internet Archive, LeoFS, Riak CS, Minio, cloudian and others all have S3-Like API's. Amazon must be aware that these products exist and by allowing such products to exist without defending their rights (what ever they are) to the API they allowed an implied license for the API to be created thus Oracle's implementation is just another implementation of that implied license. A "Workaround" to such could be taking lets say Internet Archive to one side and saying "Hey, we like what you do, but we have a copyright on that API you are using. Pay us $1 and we will grant you a license to use that API.". Personally I dislike the idea of enforcing copyrights on an API (Sure, enforce them code behind that API, unless you wish to give that away) and feel that the products using them should stand on their own.