If you cannot build a case for protecting the significant creativity and unique expression in the design of an API, then there is little you can build a case for copyrighting.
If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and seek a carve-out exception in statute. Asking the courts to affirm what they assume to be the case undermines all of copyright. I know some Hackernews are okay with that, but I have friends and family who are artists and musicians, and they want to be able to put food on the table doing what they love.
> If techies want APIs to be uncopyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and see a carve-out exception in statute.
By the same token, if we are rejecting judge made law that isn't expressly in the statute, if technies want APIs (or, for that matter, computer programs!) to be copyrightable, the solution is to go to Congress and get an explicit carve-in put in the statute. As it is, the only things explicitly included in copyright protection are:
--quote--
(1)literary works;
(2)musical works, including any accompanying words;
(3)dramatic works, including any accompanying music;
(4)pantomimes and choreographic works;
(5)pictorial, graphic, and sculptural works;
(6)motion pictures and other audiovisual works;
(7)sound recordings; and
(8)architectural works.
--end quote--
Now, certainly some computer programs include things that fall on that list as components, and some might arguably be described as being interactive forms of one or the other category.
But APIs, themselves, don't fall into any of those categories, so why would they need an explicit carve-out when they aren't carved-in in the first place?
The law specifically protects programs as a form of literary work. An API declaration is a fragment of a program, which is copyrightable under statute, just like chapter titles and headings are fragments of a literary work. API declarations constitute expression of an idea which has many ways to be expressed. And... even if a small part of a larger work is copied without authroization or license, then the copyright has been infringed.
Therefore, it should be uncontroversial that APIs are subject to copyright and that Google was infringing.
> The law specifically protects programs as a form of literary work.
No, it doesn't (it's true that it implicitly does so with limitations on the protection that can be applied to them later than where it specifies what is protected, but it does not explictly include them in the list of what is protected, or explictly define them as “literary works” which are explicitly protected.) Computer programs (whether source code or otherwise) are processes. They aren't literary works describing processes. It's easy enough to see this is true.
If you change the expression of a literary work but not the process it describes, if someone is executing the process based on the new description as part of a larger set of processes, there is no impact—the process itself is unaffected.
If you change the supposed “expression” of a piece of computer source code, say by changing the names used for functions and arguments either that it calls or that it defines, and then compile it with other software it normally links with, it either breaks or creates object code that behaves differently at runtime. There is no “literary expression” that is not part of the process code describes, whether it relates to the compile time process the code describes, the link time process, or the runtime process. Code is pure process, and not only is process not explicitly protected it is explicitly not protected by copyright.
> API declarations constitute expression of an idea which has many ways to be expressed.
No, they are a concrete embodiment of a process (well, a set of potentially compile time, link time, runtime, and maybe other processes), and any change alters the process embodied materially. That's even more obviously the case with API definitions than it is with code generally, since the whole use of API declarations is to formally, mechanically define the functionality of the interface between separate pieces of code.
Please at least attempt to address the gaping holes in your arguments when posting.
When a work as a whole is copyrightable, that does not automatically mean that any subset of that work is copyrightable. You need to actually explain why and how your examples of chapter titles and headings are still eligible for copyright protection.
