I can recommend focusing on Justice Thomas' dissent, which contains a section related to this topic. I believe Justice Thomas agrees with your assessment, and he raises concern that the SCOTUS has essentially made APIs practically uncopyrightable (in that they will 100% of the time find that it's fair-use to use them). I actually disagree with him, but only in one sub-category: I think a SCOTUS ruling would be harder to predict in a situation where someone 100% copied an API that had no implementation. That removes the mitigating factor of what portion of the work was used.
Ironically the most protected APIs may be the ones nobody implements.
Had Justice Thomas' opinion prevailed, most everything within POSIX was originally copyright by AT&T USL as part of System V, and would be owned by the current holders of that intellectual property.
Anyone using fork(), stat(), open(), or other basic parts of the UNIX development environment would be in violation.
Those copyrights were purchased by Novell at some point, and I believe ended up with Attachmate.
One would think that the C Programming Language is also covered by copyright via the K&R books, which would put anyone using printf() in the same position.
Absolutely, but courts are supposed to interpret the law, not rule whichever way avoids nightmare scenarios.
The risk of going too far in that direction (and this is by no means the first case in which SCOTUS c̶l̶e̶a̶r̶l̶y̶ may have rationalized a decision for pragmatic reasons) is that it makes the court more corruptible. I am glad the majority ruled this way, because I agree that it leads to a better outcome in this case. On the other hand, any departure from a pure interpretation of the law is very dangerous, because it normalizes the more-corruptible mode of operation, and that can lead to another kind of "nightmare scenario".
> On the other hand, any departure from a pure interpretation of the law is very dangerous
You should read the law in question. This would be Section 107 of the Copyright Act, which defines "fair use". It's extremely vague and is best interpreted as a set of considerations that the courts should take into account so that they can handle situations like this one on a case by case basis. If Congress wanted to be more prescriptive, they could (ETA: and if they become unhappy with the courts' decisions they still can in the future), but I think that would lead to worse outcomes.
The law also states that copyright's purpose is to stimulate progress of the arts, and that's why fair use is possible. Interpreting the law also means establishing the limits of fair use.
No, fair use is possible because of the First Amendment. While it is now adopted in statute, the statute was codifying a Constitutional limit that courts previously found in copyright protection grounded in the First Amendment, not the Copyright Clause.
But, still, yes, determining the scope and applicability of fair use is part of applying the law.
Ah, I had heard of the first amendment thing but I thought it was why government work must be in the public domain (i.e. putting it under copyright would prevent reproduction and therefore infringe first amendment rights).
You would certainly hope so, but that logic just passes the responsibility to interpret law faithfully onto the lower courts, which are also perhaps more easily corrupted.
I believe Justice Thomas agrees with your assessment, and he raises concern that the SCOTUS has essentially made APIs practically uncopyrightable (in that they will 100% of the time find that it's fair-use to use them).
That would seem a reasonable outcome, for much the same reason that copyright not protecting the appearance of fonts under US law is reasonable. Yes, it is overriding copyright protection for a creative work that would otherwise apply. However, it does so because a greater good is served, in this case by ensuring that interoperability cannot be encumbered, something which (as the majority opinion alludes) goes against the very purpose of copyright under US law.
The main legal basis for the majority opinion seems to be fair use, so isn't the system operating as intended? The legislators set out a principle of fair use in statute. The court applied that principle in the context of this specific case.
I think you mean “If you want your API copyrightable, don't make it public”, not “If you want your API non copyrightable, don't make it public”
Now, how do you let third parties program against that non-public API? Would only showing it to licensees be a legal way to do that?
If so, and if the API becomes popular, I don’t see how to prevent those licensees from leaking the API to the world, say through small code snippets on Stack Overflow.
That’s a good thing. The ability to copy an API allows more competition, helps improve services as others provide similar functionality, and forces improvement because it becomes easier to migrate from one service to another.
One thing I do see happening is that sensitive and expensive to develop algorithm internals may be prevented from leaking into APIs. I, again, don’t see this as anything other than a win for devs. An API is fundamentally used to get stuff done, if a developer doesn’t need to know the implementation details I overall think this is a win for the developer using the API.
Calling someone stupid or foolish is calling names in the sense that the site guidelines use that term. They ask you to omit all that from your posts to HN. Would you please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules?
Ironically the most protected APIs may be the ones nobody implements.