[Discuss] can you copyright an API?

[me at mattgillen.net (Matthew Gillen)]

On 04/25/2012 03:43 PM, jc at trillian.mit.edu wrote:
> 
> One thing I wonder is whether there is an actua legal  definition  of
> an "API".  The software industry plays fast and loose with this term.
> I've seen things labelled "API" whose only content is a  header  file
> that looks like:
> 
> int func(int arg1, int arg2);
> 
> To some software managers' minds, that's all you need to create a new
> "API". If it can be copyrighted, then everyone who has ever written a
> function that takes two integer args and returns an integer result is
> in violation of the copyright.
> 
> So if I wanted to avoid being the victim of a lawsuit like this  one,
> how  would  I know that my "API" is original enough to qualify for my
> own copyright?  As far as I know, there  is  no  legal  definiton  of
> "API", but of course I could be wrong.

Collections of phone numbers are not copyrightable, but
non-trivial/creative organizations of those phone numbers can be (e.g.
alphabetical by name is considered a trivial organization).  So if you
equate each function signature to a phone number, then individual
functions might not be copyright-able, but collections of functions
might be:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural
> For example, a recipe is a process, and not copyrightable, but the
> words used to describe it are; see idea-expression divide and
> Publications International v Meredith Corp. (1996).[2] Therefore, you
> can rewrite a recipe in your own words and publish it without
> infringing copyrights. But, if you rewrote every recipe from a
> particular cookbook, you might still be found to have infringed the
> author's copyright in the choice of recipes and their "coordination"
> and "presentation", even if you used different words; however, the
> West decisions below suggest that this is unlikely unless there is
> some significant creativity carried over from the original
> presentation.

I can sort of see both sides: having used horrible APIs, I know the
value of a good one. On the other hand, I'm an open source advocate, and
I understand how much /more/ valuable a good open-source API is.  If you
believe that the intent of copyright (and patents) is to promote the
public good (i.e. to encourage works that would not be produced
otherwise; as opposed to some inherent 'right' of inventors/creators),
then I don't see how you can justify making an API copyright-able, since
the public is much better served by free-to-use (or free-to-implement,
as the case may be) APIs.

Matt