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> I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry. There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and t

> I believe that's a fair price to pay for breaking the software industry. There is a theoretical legal question of whether APIs should be copyrightable, and then there are the practical issues. As a purely legal matter, there is a strong (but not slam-dunk) case that an API is copyrightable. As a practical matter however, everyone in the software industry has been operating as if APIs were free to copy for decades, and enforcing such a copyright would break a ton of things. Practical effects of a legal ruling are generally not "officially" considered by the judge, but more-often-than-not, they're operating behind the scenes and judges craft their opinions to support an established status-quo.

m463 7y ago
There's an interesting analogy with microprocessor architecture.. I believe the Z80 was a copy of the 8080 architecture - it used the same binary opcodes but it used an assembly language with different words. So an API is at source level, so it uses words which seem more aligned with copyright of text. I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? p.s. and amusingly when intel did the 8086, it was source level compatible with the 8080, but not binary.
- speedplane 7y ago
  > I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.
  - alexis_fr 7y ago
    So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark?
    - bmn__ 7y ago
      Yes, but only because during your fork, you neglected to run the "white label" script that replaces the trademarked words and graphics. IOW, what you describe is not a problem in practice.
    - freeone3000 7y ago
      See: CentOS, Red Hat, and "upstream"
    - speedplane 7y ago
      > So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark? Yup. However, I suspect that Ubuntu gives a pretty permissive trademark license in their distribution. This isn't a theoretical argument, the Android OS is open source, but the "Android" brand is a protected trademark. If you're a cell phone manufacturer, you can use the Android code freely, but if you want to put an Android sticker on your phone, you have to follow Google's rules.
- martinmunk 7y ago
  This reminds me of the gameboy copy protection. The device looked for the Nintendo bitmap in the cartridge boot screen before it continued execution. That way you couldn't make third party cartridges without stepping on their trademark. (On mobile so can't find video source)
  - tomxor 7y ago
    Interesting, that's pretty cunning... Not indefeatable i wonder? The interesting thing about cartridges is their potential to house more than just a ROM, there have been a few HN posts about such games - in one of them it effectively worked around the physical memory address limitations by switching blocks based on the contents of a small area of memory. In this case perhaps a gameboy cartridge could differentiate the sequence of reads for nintendo bitmap detection (which could be argued as API) and reads for the actual boot display and present different data... that's assuming they are separate reads, if the gameboy handles boot display all by itself and checks in the same step then i guess it's indefeatable.
    - thristian 7y ago
      A real Game Boy reads the logo data once to copy it into video RAM, then a second time to validate it, so a cart with clever hardware can make the boot-up logo display whatever they want: https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement.
      - tomxor 7y ago
        cool > Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement. Yeah i think this is the bit that a brave publisher could have argued in court, I think for it to be a trademark violation it would have to be visible somewhere beyond the raw content of the ROM. That's why i'd argue it's essentially being used as an API token, and trademark definitely doesn't cover that.
GoblinSlayer 7y ago
DMCA already puts interoperability above copyright.

m463 7y ago

There's an interesting analogy with microprocessor architecture.. I believe the Z80 was a copy of the 8080 architecture - it used the same binary opcodes but it used an assembly language with different words. So an API is at source level, so it uses words which seem more aligned with copyright of text. I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? p.s. and amusingly when intel did the 8086, it was source level compatible with the 8080, but not binary.

speedplane 7y ago
> I wonder what would happen if the api had the text "oracle" in the function names? Wouldn't affect copyright law too much, but Oracle could probably raise a trademark infringement claim too.
- alexis_fr 7y ago
  So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark?
  - bmn__ 7y ago
    Yes, but only because during your fork, you neglected to run the "white label" script that replaces the trademarked words and graphics. IOW, what you describe is not a problem in practice.
  - freeone3000 7y ago
    See: CentOS, Red Hat, and "upstream"
  - speedplane 7y ago
    > So Ubuntu is open-source, but if I fork it, it comes with « Ubuntu » in package names, therefore I’m infringing on their trademark? Yup. However, I suspect that Ubuntu gives a pretty permissive trademark license in their distribution. This isn't a theoretical argument, the Android OS is open source, but the "Android" brand is a protected trademark. If you're a cell phone manufacturer, you can use the Android code freely, but if you want to put an Android sticker on your phone, you have to follow Google's rules.
martinmunk 7y ago
This reminds me of the gameboy copy protection. The device looked for the Nintendo bitmap in the cartridge boot screen before it continued execution. That way you couldn't make third party cartridges without stepping on their trademark. (On mobile so can't find video source)
- tomxor 7y ago
  Interesting, that's pretty cunning... Not indefeatable i wonder? The interesting thing about cartridges is their potential to house more than just a ROM, there have been a few HN posts about such games - in one of them it effectively worked around the physical memory address limitations by switching blocks based on the contents of a small area of memory. In this case perhaps a gameboy cartridge could differentiate the sequence of reads for nintendo bitmap detection (which could be argued as API) and reads for the actual boot display and present different data... that's assuming they are separate reads, if the gameboy handles boot display all by itself and checks in the same step then i guess it's indefeatable.
  - thristian 7y ago
    A real Game Boy reads the logo data once to copy it into video RAM, then a second time to validate it, so a cart with clever hardware can make the boot-up logo display whatever they want: https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ https://dhole.github.io/post/gameboy_custom_logo/ Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement.
    - tomxor 7y ago
      cool > Of course, you still have to include a copy of the Nintendo logo to get past the BIOS check, even if it's not displayed, which I think is supposed to be the trademark infringement. Yeah i think this is the bit that a brave publisher could have argued in court, I think for it to be a trademark violation it would have to be visible somewhere beyond the raw content of the ROM. That's why i'd argue it's essentially being used as an API token, and trademark definitely doesn't cover that.

GoblinSlayer 7y ago