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"While valuable, there's nothing creative about an API." This quite fundamentally flawed. In many cases, the APIs are the most important and hardest work, and
by jariel 7y ago
"While valuable, there's nothing creative about an API."
This quite fundamentally flawed. In many cases, the APIs are the most important and hardest work, and the implementation is arbitrary.
- dragonwriter 7y ago> In many cases, the APIs are the most important and hardest work Importance and hard work aren't the issue. The particular sense of expressive creativity protected by copyright, distinct from the kind of functional invention protected, if at all, by patents, is the issue. APIs are (often not particularly novel, but sometimes quite nov) functional inventions, not works of authorship. Yes, API design is critically important to the functionality, sometimes.the most important and hardest work in building the functional software. That is not an argument for copyrightability, however. It's more of an argument against it.
- jariel 7y agoI get that 'hard/creative/important work' isn't the core of the legal issue, I was referring to the statement in the text, which I think is quite wrong. But APIs are, I think, 'works of authorship'. It seems rational to me that APIs should have the same copyright protections as code, poetry, music, etc..