You’re misunderstanding your cookie analogy. You can’t copyright a single recipe that contains components of other recipes, but if you had written a book titled “My grandmas chocolate chip cookies from scratch”, where the first recipe is for homemade chocolate chips, the second is for how to grind your own flour for dough, and the third is for combining the previous two into a cookie, then yeah you can copyright that particular set of recipes. But someone else can use any one of your recipes independently without worrying about infringement.

Think of it like you put in the effort to curate a collection of recipes that work well together, and that curation is what’s copyrightable.

I don’t know what will happen with the law, and if APIs like this will be deemed a “curation”, but it makes a lot more sense to me from that perspective.

Ex.

Anyone can have a `Math.remainder` function, but the curation of an entire `Math` library might be copyrightable, since the effort was in collecting all of the correct things that work well together, even if they aren’t individually copyrightable.

A mega-recipe containing other recipes would be like making a `Math.AddAndThenMultiply`, which even if someone else had created the Add and Multiply methods, you aren’t stealing their API curation of methods, you’re just combining logic/algorithms (ingredients) from multiple methods (recipes) into a bigger method (mega-recipe).

You seem to have misread what was being said, because you seem to be arguing against something that was explicitly stated to not be the case:

> individual recipes are generally not copyrightable, but if you compile a set of recipes and publish them in a cookbook, the cookbook itself becomes copyrightable.

(emphasis mine)

The law understands that the whole is more than the sum of its parts. And Java adds up a lot of parts. It's also an interesting model case because it's inherently so very open, without (particularly pre-Jigsaw) a clearly demarcated dividing line between "API" and "implementation." Alito's not unreasonable to suggest that a Supreme Court ruling in Google's favor might raise difficult questions about how copyright law applies to software in general.

Isn't that exactly what the article is saying about the justices worrying it could "undermine copyright of computer programs"? What is the difference between an API (interface) and implementation? The algorithm. And algorithms are not copyrightable.

A lot can be interpreted into the law when it is beneficial for everybody to do so. But interpretation has its limits. Some laws must be made explicit by the legislature.

You can copyright recipes but it's functionally useless if you want to protect against reinvention. Someone can make cookies based on your recipe and then make them again without looking at the recipe and then finally write their own recipe and still not violate copyright. You could repeat this for every single recipe in the book and then create an almost identical book with exactly the same recipes in the same order. There would be some minor differences because your memory is off and you have some creative freedom to design the book any way you want. However you wrote that book yourself and therefore it is yours.

Is there still a way to protect your cookies? Yes, it's called patent law. It's explicitly designed to prevent reinvention.

Perhaps I should not have used the recipe analogy as it might be causing unnecessary confusion. But I don't think the situations are all that similar. If an individual recipe is non-copyrightable because it describes a "process, procedure, or method" then a mega-recipe created by combining other recipes together will still be non-copyrightable for the same reason. That's not quite the same thing as curating a set of recipes into a cookbook and thereby exercising creativity in the "selection, coordination, and arrangement" of those recipes.

Microsoft should get in on this, then. Because the Java and C# Math classes are virtually identical, aside from method case.