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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Replying to @cmuratori @deguerre
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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Replying to @cmuratori @deguerre
It would be nice to see a more reasonable copyright term restored, perhaps to pre-1970s lengths, which struck a much fairer balance in my opinion.
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Replying to @cmuratori @deguerre
That said, I'm not sure the Katy Perry situation is relevant here, though. Music copyright in the US is a completely separate section of the law, and has completely different rules. It has all sorts of bizarre things, like the compulsory license, etc.
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So it's important to always remember any time you hear anything about a US music copyright case, you basically can't generalize it to any other field, because the law is completely different in effectively every respect!
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