> the pile of #include directives at the top of a C file is not copyrightable
That used to be the thought, but Google v. Oracle ended with de mininimis defenses struck down, and imports still copyrightable, just Google was afforded a fair use defense to copying.
I thought Google v. Oracle was about API structure, not imports. While I obviously don't think API structure should be copyrightable, we clearly can't extrapolate from that to a list of imports. The former is something chosen by an environment designer and needed for compatibility; the latter is just boilerplate every user of a given environment needs to write.
There is certainly creativity in API design, it's just that the right to interoperability and the utilitarian aspect should trump any copyright claim on the API itself. But there is no creativity in writing imports; you aren't making any material decisions, you're just doing something the compiler requires you to do.
To be copyrightable, you still need to have verbatim components that are copied (or 'mechanically' meaning algorithmically transformed from verbatim components). Abstract concepts like API design still can't be have copyright protections directly per se; it's a concept as a proxy of the copyright over the "declaring code" of import and export definitions. That's why I brought up how de minimis defenses were also struck down; the next direction people go is saying 'well, it's just one line to import the library, surely that's not enough'. The fair use defense afforded to Google for a very abstract interpretation of interoperability is sort of the last bastion we're left at the moment.
But as someone who's a big fan of your work, I'd implore you to not trust myself or your knowledge on this and hit up a lawyer. You're close enough to the edge of legality with a lot of your work that I'd hate to see you stifled by a minor misunderstanding here that could have been avoided. Google v. Oracle ended better than it could have, but AFAICT still heavily complicated RE work and independent implementations. It made a lot of this murkier, and being at least internally consistent with a legal theory here could make a bad situation at least a little better by leaving you with more options.
> But as someone who's a big fan of your work, I'd implore you to not trust myself or your knowledge on this and hit up a lawyer. You're close enough to the edge of legality with a lot of your work that I'd hate to see you stifled by a minor misunderstanding here that could have been avoided.
I do not retain a lawyer personally, but I inform myself of legal opinions around this field. It's why I felt comfortable enough to write this:
Ultimately though, once you stay clear of obviously problematic actions, the question of whether you're going to get in trouble boils down to whether the company you're up against is evil, for better or for worse. Given that Apple isn't going around suing jailbreakers and Hackintoshers, I'm not too worried that they'll go after us as long as we don't do anything stupid.
Conversely, I got frivolously sued by Sony for talking about a security vulnerability in the PS3... and yeah, I had to get a lawyer for that one.
In the end, once you get yourself deep enough into legal analysis around these subjects, you come to the conclusion that everyone violates copyright in little ways, all the time, and the world would grind to a halt if we stopped. The system is broken and relies on the goodwill of the people participating to not completely collapse. For example, I've previously mentioned how copying most example code you find online, e.g. in places like Stack Overflow, is a copyright violation unless you adhere strictly to the license (did you know SO content is licensed under CC-BY-SA?). Posting third party code snippets to most services, e.g. Twitter, is a copyright violation due to incompatibility between the license and the ToS requirements of the site. And so on.
As far as I remember the SCotUS verdict was "we don't want to say if it's copyrightable or not, but if it were copyritable it would fall under fair use".
That used to be the thought, but Google v. Oracle ended with de mininimis defenses struck down, and imports still copyrightable, just Google was afforded a fair use defense to copying.