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I can’t understand the practical effect of a copywriting an API. Why would a company publish an API if they didn’t want people to use it? Paid APIs exist as we

I can’t understand the practical effect of a copywriting an API. Why would a company publish an API if they didn’t want people to use it? Paid APIs exist as well. Why does copyright stop the example of sharing photos between different services? What’s stopping Google from rejecting photos from nonGoogle devices right now?

staticassertion 7y ago
AFAIK the issue is not using the API, it's reimplementing it verbatim. For example, AWS has done this a lot - many of AWS's services are 'drop in' for open source projects, making it easy to migrate off of, say, RabbitMQ, or Cassandra, or Mongo, and over to SQS or one of their databases. If Google loses those open source projects could protect themselves against this by copyrighting their APIs.
- hackerbabz 7y ago
  Now I’m even more confused. That sounds completely different from copyrighting an API. Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? That’s the work they did.
  - staticassertion 7y ago
    Well perhaps I'm the one that's confused then. > Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? This is what a software license is - software licenses are, to my knowledge, just a form of copyright. The question here is if the API is copyrightable, not just the implementation. In my opinion it is, the API is, as you say, part of the work they did. Honestly I feel like I have to be missing something. Articles like this exclaim that there is a consensus among programmers that I'm wrong, so I feel like I've got to have misunderstood.
sgift 7y ago
Many reasons, e.g. You want people to use your API, but not reimplement it. Or you want to allow people to use your API for specific use cases without paying, but want money for others. Sun wanted the second one, Google thought they could get away with ignoring that and now someone has to sort out the fallout and make a decision.

staticassertion 7y ago

AFAIK the issue is not using the API, it's reimplementing it verbatim. For example, AWS has done this a lot - many of AWS's services are 'drop in' for open source projects, making it easy to migrate off of, say, RabbitMQ, or Cassandra, or Mongo, and over to SQS or one of their databases. If Google loses those open source projects could protect themselves against this by copyrighting their APIs.

hackerbabz 7y ago
Now I’m even more confused. That sounds completely different from copyrighting an API. Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? That’s the work they did.
- staticassertion 7y ago
  Well perhaps I'm the one that's confused then. > Why shouldn’t a company be able to copyright the implementation? This is what a software license is - software licenses are, to my knowledge, just a form of copyright. The question here is if the API is copyrightable, not just the implementation. In my opinion it is, the API is, as you say, part of the work they did. Honestly I feel like I have to be missing something. Articles like this exclaim that there is a consensus among programmers that I'm wrong, so I feel like I've got to have misunderstood.

sgift 7y ago

Many reasons, e.g. You want people to use your API, but not reimplement it. Or you want to allow people to use your API for specific use cases without paying, but want money for others. Sun wanted the second one, Google thought they could get away with ignoring that and now someone has to sort out the fallout and make a decision.