[byte1918]

I was making an analogy in my mind between API function names and song titles. IANAL but I thought at first that it doesn't make sense to copyright song titles, they are generic and uninteresting most of the time but after giving it further consideration I realized that some can be quite meaningful, for instance everyone recognizes 'Stairway to heaven' and 'Bohemian rhapsody' therefore, even though it seems a bit silly I wouldn't be surprised if those song titles are in fact copyrighted which could mean copyrighting function names is not that different. I then decided to actually google this and found out that:

>Generally, copyright law protection does not extend to song titles because they usually are short and lack sufficient originality. Therefore, you can (and often do) have multiple songs with the same name, and the first to name their song, for example "Crazy," does not have the right to stop other people from releasing their own songs named "Crazy." An exception to this is that some long titles may be found to have sufficient originality to be afforded copyright protection. I suspect that my friend's song entitled "The Concept of the Quantum-Mechanical Bodymind Has Sparked a Great Idea" is one of them. [1]

The whole article from [1] is worth reading. I wouldn't be surprised if the final verdict will be similar to song title laws from the music industry.

[1]: http://www.askamusiclawyer.com/archive/is-my-song-title-prot...