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I'm not a lawyer either. As I understand it, the design document itself is protected by copyright, but the physical device itself is not. I think the reason fo

I'm not a lawyer either. As I understand it, the design document itself is protected by copyright, but the physical device itself is not. I think the reason for this is that copyright and patent law exists to promote the advancement of the arts and sciences. When copyright covers a work it also covers smaller portions of it. With machines there's often only a few efficient ways of making it work. If those were covered by copyright then everyone else would have to invent new ways of doing the same thing. You can get a patent on a novel machine though, but patents last for much less time than copyright does. It's a bit like copyrighting an API and then everyone else has to rename their math.min and math.max functions.

j-james 6y ago
> It's a bit like copyrighting an API and then everyone else has to rename their math.min and math.max functions. Well, that's still up in the air, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America#Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America#Supre...
- monadic2 6y ago
  Which expression of the API is copyrighted? You can’t copyright an abstract concept—quite literally a meaningless idea. The documentation, the code, some kind of more formal expression of the exposed functionality? The distributed binary?
  - j-james 6y ago
    Re. Oracle vs Google, I believe Oracle's arguing it's the method names themselves, so a formal expression of the exposed functionality. These are methods like math.min and math.max. If your Java implementation doesn't have methods named math.min and math.max, regardless of how they're written, a whole lot of Java programs aren't going to work. This (in my opinion) falls into the "there's only a few [efficient] ways of making it work" category, and shouldn't be copyrightable. But I guess we'll see what happens once courts resume. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459 (another, separate, point of contention in Oracle v. Google is the rangeCheck method, the code of which is identical in both implementations. but there's only so many ways to write a rangeCheck function...)

j-james 6y ago

> It's a bit like copyrighting an API and then everyone else has to rename their math.min and math.max functions. Well, that's still up in the air, isn't it? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America#Supreme_Court https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_v._Oracle_America#Supre...

monadic2 6y ago
Which expression of the API is copyrighted? You can’t copyright an abstract concept—quite literally a meaningless idea. The documentation, the code, some kind of more formal expression of the exposed functionality? The distributed binary?
- j-james 6y ago
  Re. Oracle vs Google, I believe Oracle's arguing it's the method names themselves, so a formal expression of the exposed functionality. These are methods like math.min and math.max. If your Java implementation doesn't have methods named math.min and math.max, regardless of how they're written, a whole lot of Java programs aren't going to work. This (in my opinion) falls into the "there's only a few [efficient] ways of making it work" category, and shouldn't be copyrightable. But I guess we'll see what happens once courts resume. http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459 http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20120531172522459 (another, separate, point of contention in Oracle v. Google is the rangeCheck method, the code of which is identical in both implementations. but there's only so many ways to write a rangeCheck function...)