I imagine the illustrator did the art work-for-hire and the automaker holds
the copyright on the illustration and manual. But I see your point as to
conflating implementation with the documentation. And us folks
who've
used java for awhile knows that documentation is automatically
generated with
the javadocs utility. We just have to write the descriptions.
(Looks at feet.
Shuffles a bit.) Does the api rise to the level of a
manual, in terms of
protected expression in a tangible medium? Did Sun
effectively reserve any
rights? I come back to this, while Google did
the work to implement, they
used Sun's blueprint in order to have a competitive
advantage in the smartphone
market: if developers had to learn a new
language, they might pass on paying
the costs to bring their products to the
platform. So Google paid some dues.
Did they pay all they needed to? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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