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.
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Suggesting that somehow figuring out the correct way to design something is less important than having filled in the functions with their (usually obvious) implementation is frankly rather absurd. If you want to argue _none_ of it is copyrightable, go ahead...
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Replying to @cmuratori
The lawsuit is about the Java APIs. Any discussion of "the correct way to design something" is probably irrelevant. But I guess the point is that this is in line with engineering practice in other disciplines.
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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
Good building safety codes are hard to come up with but it'd be bad for everyone if you had to make your building less safe because someone claimed to own the code.
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Replying to @deguerre
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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Replying to @cmuratori
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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Replying to @deguerre @cmuratori
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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Replying to @deguerre
Yes, it is an entire system and must be thought of that way. People focus on the "public good" part, and they're not wrong, but they neglect to ask _who is actually going to make good things that will eventually become public_. Right now, the answer is kind of "nobody".
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Replying to @cmuratori @deguerre
Giving people the ability to profit off good API design would be one possible way to encourage good API design that could eventually become a public good once it was clear that something was important and high-quality.
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Replying to @cmuratori @deguerre
As you say, unfortunately our current IP system isn't designed very well, so this causes a problem, but working with what exists, copyright seems much better than patent, because patent is far too broad for an API.
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Copyright seems like the better fit, because it protects the specific API, not all APIs that are similar. That seems like what you would want. "This is JAVA, specifically" is what should be copyrighted - not "all things that are sort of like JAVA".
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Replying to @cmuratori
Which is also how copyright should work, but apparently doesn't in the US. See Katy Perry "Dark Horse" for details. Also interestingly, Oracle's original complaint was that Google essentially wanted to fork the platform.
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Replying to @deguerre
Copyright in the US definitely has serious problems, largely due to Congressional "help". For example, the term for copyright is now absurd - for all practical purposes, it is a century long or worse, and that clearly doesn't serve the public good.
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