I suggest that the following scenario would be only too plausible were it
possible to copyright APIs...
Zorcobi Technologies offers a
development environment which includes a virtual machine that can run programs
written in an object-oriented language called Papua. Associated with
this language is a standard API that can be used to interact with relational
databases.
John Doe develops a suite of applications written in
Papua which interacts extensively with a commercial database, and uses
the Papua standard API to do so. Therefore the source code of John Doe's
classes must use the data types and method calls required by the signatures of
the methods in the Papua standard API. Moreover John Doe's classes must either
catch all exceptions thrown by Zorcobi's Papua Classes, or else must throw them,
and declare that they do so. The development of John Doe's application suite
represents a significant investment.
John Doe's colleague, Richard Roe,
is developing a database management system, and the company wishes to make use
of John Doe's application suite in conjunction with both Richard Roe's database
management system, and also with Zorcobi's development environment, which can
interact with most standard commercial databases. Therefore Richard Roe
develops classes in Papua to enable interactions with the database. But because
these classes must interoperate with John Doe's application suite, Richard Roe
needs to reproduce the structure and method signatures of Zircobi's Papua API.
Thus, although both John Doe's software and Richard Roe's software are being
developed by the company that employs them both, they interact using a
substantial portion of Zorcobi's API.
If Zorcobi's API were
copyrightable, then Zorcobi Technologies might well demand licensing fees and
place onerous licensing conditions on the company that employs both John Doe and
Richard Roe. Zorcobi Technologies might in particular refuse the use of the API
unless the entire standard Papua API were implemented by the company. Moreover
the API might well include classes and methods that could not be implemented
without licensing a number of patents. And, quite possibly, Zorcobi
Technologies might own quite a number of those patents... [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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