There are ways of copying APIs that do not violate copyright Are there? That's exactly what's being litigated. Two inventors build the exact same thing Paten

There are ways of copying APIs that do not violate copyright Are there? That's exactly what's being litigated. Two inventors build the exact same thing Patents don't cover APIs, by the nature of their form as a patent typically must make a narrow list of claims. To patent the Java API would presumably require making the entire specification a set of claims, which the PTO wouldn't accept. You could argue APIs should be patentable but not copyrightable. That'd be weird though. Copyright is clearly the better fit, if you want APIs to be protected works. Clean room designs are the status quo in the hardware world. There is zero fragility. It's done all the time. No. The hardware world is the exact opposite of what you claim. ARM sells ISA licenses exactly because in the hardware world the Oracle side won out a long time ago: if you want to implement the ARM instruction set you need to pay ARM for the privilege. And if you want to use ARM's implementation you need to pay them even more. AMD can only make Intel-compatible chips because they have an architecture license for complex historical reasons, and so on.