4 ms·

The solution here is to pass a law that exempts APIs from copyright, not to rely on a geriatric body of lawyers to interpret laws not designed around technology

• gpm 6y ago
  The current law does exempt APIs from copyright via sensible general principles (you can't copyright functional things, which as applied in this case is known as the merger doctrine). If the court gets it wrong congress should fix it, but ideally we don't want a law that is a patchwork of tiny little exceptions because that fails to generalize to new things, so we would rather that the court just properly understands how to apply general principles. Even if the court gets it wrong, my favored way of fixing it would be to modify the general principle to be less ambiguous to this case, not to explicitly make an api exception.
  • nimish 6y ago
    SCOTUS interpretation of an act is case law. With a single legislative act, we need not worry about this or anything else, modulo constitutional issues which can also be fixed via amendments. No, it is not obvious that API is a "functional thing" covered by existing law by the mere fact that SCOTUS has taken it on and it was a case to begin with. I'm not sure why a trivial act of congress isn't the first thing we jump to rather than risk ruin. All the act needs to do is clarify what copyright means. A copyright act for the digital millenium, if you will -- you can call it DMCA 2.0 :)
• dragonwriter 6y ago
  > The solution here is to pass a law that exempts APIs from copyright But APIs were never included, explicitly, in copyright in the first place. Why do they need to be explicitly excluded?
  • nimish 6y ago
    So we do not have to have a decade of a case that could be rendered moot with a single act.