I see the point that it is difficult to infringe a copyright purely by accident. I may have over- and misstated the problem as it exists at the moment. I am st

I see the point that it is difficult to infringe a copyright purely by accident. I may have over- and misstated the problem as it exists at the moment. I am still concerned that the Oracle case will push us toward copyright applying to an idea rather than an expression, as discussed elsewhere in the thread. I am bothered by the fact that an API, by its nature, to some extent, is just an idea. You call some function with parameters of certain types in a certain order and you get back some piece of information computed in a particular way from the parameters. So the function prototypes themselves (the "API") are really just descriptions of an idea the way "a red bus driving across London bridge" is a description of an idea for a photograph. They are more terse, non-English (or whatever) descriptions, but descriptions nonetheless. In this case it would be quite a bit easier to accidentally infringe a copyright because copyright would end up intersecting with patents. For example, a photo sharing service might have an API endpoint called "photo" that accepts some image and meta data through a POST request. You are starting a competing service. You are aware that their API is copyrighted so you call your endpoint "picture". But the problem now is that you've done the same thing the photographer did with the picture of the bus in London, you've intentionally wiggled around a copyright to do something very similar. Could you be sued? Maybe, seems that you could be if you happen to be in England, but I'm not a lawyer. The problem is that this makes a lawsuit seem much more likely to me than if the API itself weren't covered by copyright at all. And we definitely don't need more IP lawsuits.