[Discuss] can you copyright an API?

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

Stephen Ronan wrote:
> http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9227643/Judge_clears_Google_of_Java_copyright_infringement

Apparently you can't copyright an API...

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/05/google-wins-crucial-api-ruling-oracles-case-decimated/

  It's only the code itself--not the "how-to" instructions represented
  by APIs--that can be the subject of a copyright claim, ruled Judge
  William Alsup. "So long as the specific code used to implement a
  method is different, anyone is free under the Copyright Act to write
  his or her own code to carry out exactly the same function or
  specification of any methods used in the Java API," wrote the judge.
  [...]
  Alsup compared APIs to a library, with each package as a bookshelf in
  the library, each class a book on the shelf, and each method a chapter
  out of a how-to book. "As to the 37 packages, the Java and Android
  libraries are organized in the same basic way but all of the chapters
  in Android have been written with implementations different from Java
  but solving the same problems and providing the same functions." The
  declarations, or headers, "must be identical to carry out the given
  function," wrote Alsup.
  [...]
  Alsup's ruling comes less than a month after a European court made a
  decision along the same lines, finding that programming APIs can't be
  copyrighted because it would "monopolize ideas."
  [...]
  If Oracle had won, it would have been a novel case of a company being
  able to essentially reverse the open-source process by making any
  commercial use of Java a pay-to-play endeavor.