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I really strongly believe that APIs should not be copyrightable, and I say this as someone who has spent literally years of my life and creative energy designin

I really strongly believe that APIs should not be copyrightable, and I say this as someone who has spent literally years of my life and creative energy designing APIs. I think designing APIs is an art, and I think it is creative. But ultimately I think APIs are much more like protocols, file formats, or languages than they are like fixed works. Copyright API documentation all you like, but the day that people can control who is allowed to speak a language that they invented is the day that you cede control of everything to incumbents. What if SCO could really have sued IBM on the basis that they owned the actual APIs to UNIX? What if you couldn't actually say "#define ENOENT 1" in your own project without violating SCO's copyrights?

josephlord 13y ago
SCO tried but everything had been permissively licensed or had not been properly treated when you still needed to apply copyright notices everywhere for copyright to apply. There is also the counteracting market force that single source illiberally licensed API's are unappealing to users so in many cases granting rights to other implementations can be commercially desirable for the creator of the API. Mono's existance encourages .Net and C# adoption. Also there is the distinction between copying an API to duplicate it and USING the API to develop a program against (this would the speaking a language aspect). I would argue that using the API would never be infringement but would in all circumstances I could imagine would be fair use.