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1) No, all developers don't think APIs should not be copyrightable, unless you adopt a "no true Scotsman" definition of "developer". Many commenters on various

1) No, all developers don't think APIs should not be copyrightable, unless you adopt a "no true Scotsman" definition of "developer". Many commenters on various forums think they should be as copyrightable as any other code. (It's easy to find them: look for the most heavily downvoted comments.) Moreover, most developers who do not agree with the decision (including engineers who testified on behalf of Google) will wholeheartedly agree that writing APIs require all the creative expression involved in writing code. 2) Does anyone really believe Google independently came up with an API from specification that was a verbatim copy of 37 separate API packages? Please. Google's language was specifically crafted to reduce their own liability, but come on, nobody's buying that they didn't copy it wholesale. Maybe when you're grading high school assignments you see coincidental identical code. The API for the stdlib of the most popular programming language currently is not a high school level thing.

Oletros 12y ago
1) Then change to "a great majority of developers" instead of all developers 2) This is not what the OP tried to explain.
- throwawaykf05 12y ago
  1) Firstly, [citation needed]. The voice of a hivemind on particular forums is not any kind of data point given that the vast majority of developers don't post anywhere. Further, note that most people on these forums live in a very specific bubble, and seem to suffer a type of Dunning-Kreuger effect regarding either 1) IP, 2) law, 3) programming, or any combination of these. 2) Doesn't matter; a passage like this destroys all his credibility: > Rather, Google said two separate things: (a) they did not copy any material (other than rangeCheck), and (b) admitted that the names and declarations are the same, not because Google copied those names and declarations from Oracle's own work, but because they perform the same functions. In other words, Google makes various arguments of why those names and declarations look the same, but for reasons other than “mundane cut-and-paste copying from Oracle's copyrighted works”. Riiiight.

Oletros 12y ago

1) Then change to "a great majority of developers" instead of all developers 2) This is not what the OP tried to explain.

throwawaykf05 12y ago
1) Firstly, [citation needed]. The voice of a hivemind on particular forums is not any kind of data point given that the vast majority of developers don't post anywhere. Further, note that most people on these forums live in a very specific bubble, and seem to suffer a type of Dunning-Kreuger effect regarding either 1) IP, 2) law, 3) programming, or any combination of these. 2) Doesn't matter; a passage like this destroys all his credibility: > Rather, Google said two separate things: (a) they did not copy any material (other than rangeCheck), and (b) admitted that the names and declarations are the same, not because Google copied those names and declarations from Oracle's own work, but because they perform the same functions. In other words, Google makes various arguments of why those names and declarations look the same, but for reasons other than “mundane cut-and-paste copying from Oracle's copyrighted works”. Riiiight.