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What bad things would have happened?

It would have become MUCH more dangerous to provide an alternate implementation of someone else's library or interface, which I believe would have have a profoundly negative effect on the entire software industry.

As it currently stands, APIs absolutely fall under copyright laws.

Yes, but now there is a very strong precedent establishing the idea that copying those copyrighted API's is OK anyway (under Fair Use) under at least some circumstances. And based off the way the SCOTUS decision was worded, it strikes me (admittedly, IANAL) that the set of circumstances that are captured by this are pretty large.




IANAL, but it was always true that fair use made code exempt from copyright. Wine is alive specifically because of that.


This case would have changed that has the rolling differed.




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