> APIs are concrete work. So in the case of an API re-implemented without copying any code, what concrete work is taken? If not the code, then what thing? > A

> APIs are concrete work. So in the case of an API re-implemented without copying any code, what concrete work is taken? If not the code, then what thing? > APIs are things as much as code is. I can print out code and read it. I can't print out an API and read it. (I can print out documentation of an API, which is copyrightable, but I cannot print out the API itself). > No. sort as an API is both fundamental and preexisting. What makes sort fundamental but other things...not fundamental? Historically copyright has been pretty straightforward: if there's a physical thing (like a written work, in the case of code) you can copyright it. Now you're adding weird rules like "well some apis are obvious and fundamental but others aren't". Who dictates that? > Maybe. But that's fine. Someone would have just written their own APIs and licensed in a way that allowed others to use them - the way all software development has gone for decades. The problem here is that it means that people can, for example, api-squat. Which is terrible. Imagine the ML craze of recent years, but with Google or Facebook or whomever copyrighting the tensorflow API so that other libraries couldn't be tensorflow compatible without licensing to Google. Sure, companies could just not use Tensorflow, but it was like a half a decade ahead of the competition, and had the backing of basically the largest Machine Learning practitioner in the world. An Open Source version could maybe compete, but probably not. > Again, developers have more power in a world where Oracle wins, and less power in a world where Google wins. Some individual developers have more power, but the development community has less freedom. > The fundamental question here is who owns the code. No, the fundamental question here is if an API is copyrightable. Oracle very clearly owns the code. The question is if the concept of how to do something is a copyrightable work in the same way that actually doing a thing is. A map is not the same as a taxi, and you're saying that the protections we give taxis should also extend to maps all of a sudden. > I am far more concerned about the future, as tech companies grow massive, and consolidate. We already see AWS implementing open source APIs with drop-in replacements. But you don't seem to consider that Amazon probably already has an answer to API-licensing. > they can create licenses that restrict the ability for massive companies to reimplement their open source code as a proprietary service. No, what you're saying is that companies can restrict the ability for competitors in the same space by building arbitrary lock-in. Companies can already use licensing to prevent competitors from stealing their work, but what you're suggesting is that a competitor can prevent others from entering the space. Consider the opposite situation: Spanner and CockroachDB. If Google decided to license its API, cockroachDB couldn't exist, or at least couldn't compete. Your ideas cut both ways, they don't magically fix things for the little guy.