Other than just wanting to be able to copy other people's work as they often do all the time anyway, I'm not sure I understand major tech giants' argument as to why APIs would not be copyrightable. They are, if anything, much harder to make well than their implementations.
An API by definition is a deconstruction of a problem into the steps that are exposed to a user of something that solves that problem. You could argue for patents on it, sure, but I think that's a bad tradeoff because patents are much more restrictive than copyrights.
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To be specific, a copyright violation only occurs if it can be argued that the work in general was copied. It is not a violation to merely do something similar (eg., it's not a copyright violation to write a book about a boy wizard, etc.)
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So copyright seems very clearly (at least to me) to be the preferable way to protect software from copying, both the API and the implementation, so that similar systems can coexist without the specter of patent infringement, which is far more stringent.
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An API is a way for you to allow someone else to use your solution in their solution. It's not really what you're describing, honestly.
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