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>What happened in the past is irrelevant In other words, "I got mine". People who profited and got stupendously rich, get off scott free, and are free to deplo
by cromwellian 13y ago
>What happened in the past is irrelevant
In other words, "I got mine". People who profited and got stupendously rich, get off scott free, and are free to deploy lawyers to interfere with the next wave of participants. Not unlike immigrants who settle in, and then want to slam the door on the next group of immigrants.
>Samba implements a networking protocol, not an API
Protocols and APIs are another distinction without a different. If the sequence, structure, and organization of an API can be copyrighted, then surely, the sequence, structure, and organization of a wire protocol or file format can, after all, the only real different is the invocation mechanism.
- rayiner 13y ago> If the sequence, structure, and organization of an API can be copyrighted, then surely, the sequence, structure, and organization of a wire protocol or file format can, after all, the only real different is the invocation mechanism. While it might be easy to analogize between an API and a wire protocol in terms of technology, that doesn't mean that analogy holds within the framework of copyright law. The Fed. Cir. opinion was expressly couched in terms of the "sequence, structure, and organization" of the names in the API. Indeed, the opinion concedes that if Google had chosen different names, then things would be fine. Putting the same bytes at the same offsets is not at all the same as naming things the same way.
- georgemcbay 13y agoYeah but doesn't the distinction become way less clear when talking about protocols that aren't traditional fixed-structure binary protocols? We live in a world of protocols that are increasingly RPC/REST based which as others have mentioned are really just APIs you happen to access over a network connection.
- rayiner 13y agoGood point.