Even more than that - I can't understand how it could be that the names of the
functions are NOT protected by copyright but the selection, structure and
arrangement/organisation of the function calls in the API are.
This is because the (fully qualified) names themselves embody the selection,
structure and arrangement. If a function is called java.io.file.createnewfile
then the name fully defines the selection and structure. Only
arrangement/organisation is up for grabs and that really boils down to ordering
(alphabetical, random, or logical (eg createnewfile is followed by deletefile,
or something like that)) which I supposed you could say is aesthetic or
creative, since it is not functional.[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Your comment (and someone else's previous reply to it)
confuses things
again.
In a phone book (see Feist), the names,
addresses and
phone numbers are preexisting non-copyright
facts about the real world, and the
potential copyrightable
SSO expression is in applying an unusual, creative,
weird
non-standard ordering, not the alphabetical one.
In an API, the
functions provided are not preexisting,
only the concepts are. There is
potential room for
copyrightable expression in naming, selection, parameter
style etc. Like in any copyright work, there is no or
little copyright in the
individual words or phrases, any
copyright would be for the whole or
substantial parts of the
whole.
The API question then is
threefold:
- Can you design an API so creative in its design that it
becomes copyrightable? If so, I guess the Python language
may have some of
the most copyrightable designs around as
they tend to use humor deliberately
when naming things.
This is the question of Law much debated on Groklaw and
now
the purview of Judge Alsup. The most important legal
precedent is
Selden which ruled that copyright on a
book with included blank forms
did not extend to printing
substantially similar blank forms without the rest
of the
book.
- If so, can a useful and mostly utilitarian API ever meet
the bar for copyrightability, or is this reserved for
unusually artistic APIs
(such as my example below). This
too may be a matter for Judge Alsup
now.
- If both 1 and 2 are answered by a yes, did Sun design
the 37
API's in suit creatively enough to get copyright
protection, this would go to
the jury.
As an example, imagine an API like the
following:
package Happy;
class Birthday
{
To You();
Happy BirthDay(To
a, You b);
Happy Birthday(Dear a,
Name
larry);
Happy birthday(To a, You
b);
}
This bears a striking resemblance to a copyright
protected widely known poem/song. (Used fairly here for
parody and criticism
only.)
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