[Aleman360]

Not sure if I agree. I find that coming up with good interfaces is often more of a creative challenge than the implementation. API's are worthy of some sort of protection since ease of use is a definite competitive advantage.

Also, you can easily screw your perf with bad interfaces (especially in C++). E.g., not templatizing, requiring extra allocations, type impedance mismatches, vtable bloat, etc. The interface certainly affects how the machine executes your code.

[return0]

Are APIs/interfaces patentable?

[punctilio]

Patents have been granted on claims that essentially cover an API. I think it would be harder to get such patents issued today than 10 years ago though.

[ralfd]

Patents (20 year monopoly) would actually be less restrictive than copyrights (95 years)