Linked by Thom Holwerda on Wed 2nd May 2012 22:32 UTC, submitted by PLan
"The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality - and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said." Bravo. A landmark ruling, for sure. If the US courts decide in favour of Oracle in the Google-Oracle case, Europe would instantly become an even friendlier place for technology companies.
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2011-01-28
galvanash,
I understand what you are saying. But there is obviously more gray than you're implying.
In order to convey the precise ideas for an API, one must express the API, no exception.
When humans talk to one another, there's a great deal of room for expression. But when talking to a compiler, language constructs have a precise semantic purpose. In order to supply the idea of a compatible API structures & functions & classes to the compiler, it's necessarily going to take a form semantically resembling the original, this is an unavoidable part of creating a compatible API.
It seems the court claimed the ideas aren't copyrightable, which we already knew all along, but stopped short of saying whether expressions of those ideas were copyrightable when they produce exceedingly similar code to the original expression.