I design an API for graphical coding and spend significant creative energy choosing the right words, calling conventions, result types to not only make something intuitive, but emotionally pleasurable to code with
Sometimes I'll spend days writing out possible forms of the API — changing words, tense, syntax, until it looks and feels "right." These aren't arbitrary or purely functional decisions
Do I want my users to "read" text from a file, or "open" the file? Do I want them to handle keyboard events in a simple global function or assign callbacks into a keyboard handler under each character name. How are those callbacks shaped? What's easy to understand?
APIs aren't just restricted simple functions and types. Some may involve the creation of a custom DSL to make it easy to declare functionality in part of your system, or clusters of protocols that work together in very specific ways so users can implement a complex system atop them
I disagree. I think the specification can be, but the API code itself is a mechanical translation of the specification into computer code. Note that abstractions, names, etc are conceived in the specification and are then translated into computer code. Even if you skip the specification step, as sometimes is done, you're then dealing with an implicit, ad-hoc specification.
Edit: To clarify what I'm saying, the "creative design" aspect of what you're talking about and that I'm in no way denying, is meant to be protected via the patentability and not the copyrightability of the end product. The creativity is in the behavior not in the mechanical translation of the behavior for computers to use.
> APIs aren't just restricted simple functions and types. Some may involve the creation of a custom DSL to make it easy to declare functionality in part of your system, or clusters of protocols that work together in very specific ways so users can implement a complex system atop them
Indeed. Yet you're still describing behavior here. A DSL is an example of a specification of one language in terms of another. This is a creative work, I strongly agree! The difference is where does the creativity reside? I don't believe it's in the API code, but in the specification whether written or unwritten and therefore implied.
But certainly the API code contains naming, which is a creative aspect of API design, and in this case naming is used by developers to code against either Oracle's Java implementation, or Google's. In order to allow this Google had to copy the naming created by Oracle for their version of the API in order to attract the large pool of developers who liked and were familiar with that design.
The names that we given our APIs are inherent to their behavior and not necessarily the code. Some languages, such as Swift, even mangle API names when they are used so that their names are non-sensical without de-mangling. So why is the name important? It's important for us to understand what the system is doing, but not to the function of the system itself. This might not seem important for us when doing our work, but in the case of copyrightability it's an important fact based on precedent law.
I think that's a distinction without a difference; you might as well say that a story is a creative work but translating that story into symbols written on a page is purely mechanical.
People don't seem to grasp that there is a distinction between semantics and representation. You can represent the number 85 in many different ways. In binary, in decimal, in hexadecimal. People can copyright a representation of a number but not the number itself. If you were the first human to invent numbers as a concept, you could indeed patent numbers.
Maybe it helps if we compare this to hardware instead. You can design a CPU. The design digital files are under copyright and if you want they can also be a trade secret. However the physical hardware (i.e. the thing whose representation is your digital design files) is not protected by copyright. If you give someone access to design files e.g. via GPL (or in this case by providing the Java standard library). Then any reader of the design files is allowed to look at the arrangement of transistors and then create their own proprietary design files even though your chip design is under GPL. Copyright doesn't protect semantics. It only prevents 1:1 copies of media. When you look at the min function and see a description of its behavior that is semantics. As it stands right now you are allowed to replicate those semantics. There is no monopoly on finding the smallest of two numbers. With the existence of software patents you could in theory patent these semantics.
Now lets get to the actual problem in question. Oracle is providing users with a representation of its java API via javadoc and the standard library deliverables at least under GPL (I am merely assuming this). What does this mean in practice? Well, first of all everyone has access to the representation of the API even if they don't intend to copy it. But as we already established, Google did not copy the java libraries (unless they did which is obviously a copyright violation and they should lose the trial because of that). They merely took the semantics of the java API and built their own independent implementation of the Java standard libraries. APIs cannot be protected under copyright because the semantics of the API can be copied without triggering copyright protections the same way copyrighting your hardware design files does not prevent someone making a copy of the physical manifestation of your hardware. In the hardware world this is solved by patents which do indeed grant a monopoly on semantics. In the software world this should be solved by patents as well.
TL;DR it is possible to create identical hardware without violating copyright of the design files, it is possible to create an identical API without violating copyright of the original source files
Unlike patents, which may confer proprietary rights in relation to general ideas and concepts per se when construed as methods, copyrights cannot confer such rights. [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idea–expression_distinction#Me...
Which is perhaps not surprising, since you say you're an engineer. ;)
Nothing I've said should be construed as denying the richness and brilliance found in the design of software and software-based abstractions.
But that's not what it's about. Lots of things are a work of creative design but not copyrightable. Like a recipe for chocolate chip cookies.
