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I am really not up on copyright law, but I see this as analogous to someone writing a book. Say I wrote a book and titled all of my chapters the same as another
by kls 6y ago
I am really not up on copyright law, but I see this as analogous to someone writing a book. Say I wrote a book and titled all of my chapters the same as another book, the book was given a different title and the chapters themselves where very different on the inside but naturally my table of contents looks exactly the same, would this be considered infringe in the publishing world (I don't know)?
Also based on that:
If it would why would API's be different?
If not how was it applied differently here?
What if in the above scenario, I added some extra chapters so the TOC has all the chapters the other book had, but the TOC is not a 1 for 1?
If my analogy is wrong, what am I not seeing?
I know as someone who writes software, API's not being copyrightable is preferable, but I would like to understand how the law sees it when dealing with real physicals works and understand if the law is applied the same when it moves to less concrete works.
- zucker42 6y agoBooks are not equivalent to software because software has a functional purpose. While programming has creative elements, the primary goal of a program is to achieve certain functions (whereas the primary goal of a book is to enable creative expression or to record factual information). If I want to support a Windows program on Linux I have no choice but to implement the Windows API. Likewise, if I want to interface with a program that stores data in S3, I have to replicate the S3 API. That's why I think that there's no good analogy for software APIs among traditional media. As far as the law goes, Google's argument is that because software APIs are arbitrary choices and necessary to be copied for interoperability that software APIs are noncopyrightable under section (b) of this statute. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/102
- CameronNemo 6y agoBooks can have a functional purpose. E.g. if it is a reference manual for a car. If you used the same table of contents for the reference manual, but the contents were substantially different, would that still be unlicensed copying?
- zucker42 6y agoBooks don't have a functional purpose in the same way as software. With a book, there are many ways to state the exact same fact (and the fact itself is not protected by copyright law). With a program, there's only one way to call a particular function, or to write a function declaration that an existing program can call. The exact text used in a program is relevant to its functional purpose. A more apt analogy in the case of a reference manual is perhaps a competing manual that presented all the same maintenance information with different words, since they would achieve the same functional purpose with different expressive content.