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.
But that is true of everything. Literally. There are no industries that wouldn't have more, cheaper existing things if you removed IP protection, whether it's safety or anything else.
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The question is, if you removed that protection, would you have gotten to the current place you are, or would nobody have bothered because there was no way to make a company in that space?
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_Especially_ with APIs, which today are absolutely terrible, I think it'd be a major mistake to declare ourselves done and to discourage people from investing in designing and perfecting new APIs. Which is exactly what removing copyright protection would do.
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I'm not going to defend the American tech industry. But I guess the thing here is interoperability. Common standards are a public good. And you're right that the world should have thought very hard about using a programming language that a company claimed exclusivity over.
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Of course, the central problem is that copyright is a very poor fit for software. If we were designing an IP protection system from scratch today, we wouldn't design this.
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