Is it just me, or is this result the worst of both worlds (for the you-and-me's of the world, rather than billion dollar corporates)?
Had APIs been found not to be copyrightable, that would have been great and opened up the development ecosystem for us to use and adapt each other's APIs.
Had it been clear that no this sort of thing wasn't allowed then small developers would have had protection that they could publish their APIs without fear of a deep-pocketed competitor saying "thanks, we're going to muscle you out of the market, using your own design to do it, and ignoring any of that GPL nonsense you've licensed it licensed under, we're just having your API as our own thanks". Not an open world, but at least everyone would be on a level field.
But a "fair use" finding of fact sets no precedent for anything else, gives no protection for the ordinary developer, and essentially means "it turns out you can do this if you're big enough to afford to pay high-tier lawyers for six years". (ie, BigCorp can copy APIs with impunity, but you can't)
Had APIs been found not to be copyrightable, that would have been great and opened up the development ecosystem for us to use and adapt each other's APIs.
Had it been clear that no this sort of thing wasn't allowed then small developers would have had protection that they could publish their APIs without fear of a deep-pocketed competitor saying "thanks, we're going to muscle you out of the market, using your own design to do it, and ignoring any of that GPL nonsense you've licensed it licensed under, we're just having your API as our own thanks". Not an open world, but at least everyone would be on a level field.
But a "fair use" finding of fact sets no precedent for anything else, gives no protection for the ordinary developer, and essentially means "it turns out you can do this if you're big enough to afford to pay high-tier lawyers for six years". (ie, BigCorp can copy APIs with impunity, but you can't)