I completely agree, but I don't really know what to do about it. Surely a document describing a useful software interface (GUI, CLI, API) is a creative work and takes effort to produce. Unless we just agree that it's a necessary exception for the purposes of interoperbility I'm not sure how I would argue that it shouldn't fall under copyright protection.
Copyright would apply to the documentation itself, or the published header files themselves, as works; it wouldn't apply to the API itself.
Mind you, Oracle was suing Google for using the header files themselves; since Google could have easily just typed up their own versions that did the same thing, it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement" case: they shipped something that was exactly from Oracle, rather than just paraphrasing it. Oracle was probably in the right to sue over that.
But re: APIs—there's much more well-resolved case-law for this, coming from the gaming vertical: games have copyright, but game designs (including things like their network protocols) do not. It has both pros (Microsoft can't use the Minecraft IP to sue Terraria or Factorio; people can advance AI by writing bots that play Starcraft) and cons (the iOS and Android stores being saturated with mechanical clones of each successful game) but it's very certainly "the way things are."
Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are different things. For example, it is possible to plagiarize something that is not copyrighted, and many forms of copyright infringement wouldn't fit the definition of plagiarism.
True, but the parent seems to think they wouldn't have been plagiarizing if they had "paraphrased" the declaring code so to speak, which makes the relationship here explicit. If they had paraphrased the declaring code, it would have been much harder to say they were infringing on copyright, but instead, they copied it verbatim.
Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.
> Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.
That seems an odd thing to say. A significant portion of academic writing is paraphrasing, with attribution. What is a review article, other than attributed paraphrasing?
I'm not 100% certain of all the details but isn't that exactly what Google tried, and failed, to assert originally? If I remember correctly, the 'fair use' argument only came up after Google lost on the 'can't copyright an interface' argument, and the real travesty here is not that Google are being denied fair use (because, you're right, it's not fair use), but that Oracle's copyright claim over the Java API ever held up at all.
There are two philosophies of copyright. One, that people/companies have a moral right to control their creative output, and the other, that copyright should be granted sparsely when it has a positive impact on society, such as promoting the writing of books.
Since APIs are a byproduct of software development, it is hard to see how it should be copyrightable under the second stance, but easy for the first.
Perhaps granting copyright, but setting precedence that basically any use is fair use, is a good compromise.
