decoration decoration
Stories

GROKLAW
When you want to know more...
decoration
For layout only
Home
Archives
Site Map
Search
About Groklaw
Awards
Legal Research
Timelines
ApplevSamsung
ApplevSamsung p.2
ArchiveExplorer
Autozone
Bilski
Cases
Cast: Lawyers
Comes v. MS
Contracts/Documents
Courts
DRM
Gordon v MS
GPL
Grokdoc
HTML How To
IPI v RH
IV v. Google
Legal Docs
Lodsys
MS Litigations
MSvB&N
News Picks
Novell v. MS
Novell-MS Deal
ODF/OOXML
OOXML Appeals
OraclevGoogle
Patents
ProjectMonterey
Psystar
Quote Database
Red Hat v SCO
Salus Book
SCEA v Hotz
SCO Appeals
SCO Bankruptcy
SCO Financials
SCO Overview
SCO v IBM
SCO v Novell
SCO:Soup2Nuts
SCOsource
Sean Daly
Software Patents
Switch to Linux
Transcripts
Unix Books

Gear

Groklaw Gear

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.


You won't find me on Facebook


Donate

Donate Paypal


No Legal Advice

The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

Here's Groklaw's comments policy.


What's New

STORIES
No new stories

COMMENTS last 48 hrs
No new comments


Sponsors

Hosting:
hosted by ibiblio

On servers donated to ibiblio by AMD.

Webmaster
If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot | 697 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
If APIs cannot have copyright, the GPL is partially moot
Authored by: IMANAL_TOO on Monday, May 07 2012 @ 05:44 PM EDT
My understanding is that GPL relies on copyrights.

If the APIs cannot be copyrighted, they may end up in public
domain i guess, becuase if the APIs cannot be copyrighted
then they cannot end up in GPL.

No, I was not trolling.


---
______
IMANAL


.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

No, that is simply not true, see LGPL and GPL ...
Authored by: Anonymous on Tuesday, May 08 2012 @ 04:03 PM EDT
If the API's cannot have copyright, then there would be no point in having the
GPL and LGPL as separate licences.

The protection of the GPL essentially comes from copyright.

The LGPL is typically used for libraries, where you say "here, this is a
GPL library, but providing you just access it via the API, then thats fine, your
code is not necessarily GPL as well" .. because, effectively, they are
relaxing the copyright restrictions to make the API available without
copyright.

The only real difference with the GPL is that you cannot access GPL code, even
via its published API from non GPL code. You can't ship a GPL library next to
your non-GPL product and say "hey, its OK, we only access the library
through its API, the header files we used are de-minimis" because the GPL
police will be down on you like a ton of lead.

Its happened. Often. So to suddenly find the Free Software movement shouting
"hey, API's have never been copyright protected" when for many many
years they have been taking axactly the opposite stance in the difference
between LGPL and GPL software is a little confusing.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Groklaw © Copyright 2003-2013 Pamela Jones.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners.
Comments are owned by the individual posters.

PJ's articles are licensed under a Creative Commons License. ( Details )