[fnordprefect]

  One of the big open questions is "are APIs copyrightable?" 

The Australian equivalent to the US Supreme Court considered this over 20 years ago, and imho got the correct result (not copyrightable): http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/viewdoc/au/cases/cth/HCA/1...

IMHO they got the Huffman table wrong, although arguably it was the result compelled by an overprotective approach.

[ifore]

It seems that it was somewhat inevitable given the US vs Australian distinction on whether to protect Creativity vs Effort (years ago I investigated this rabbit hole when I had a client who wanted to set up a White Pages clone site by buying the data from someone who had digitised it [with a lot of manual entry!] by low-paid Indians. They were very disappointed when I told them to contact an IP lawyer because it was almost certainly going to get them sued)

I did cry a little at the court's assertion creating the huffman table required "a very great deal of hard work". Gather a corpus of databases you have lying around, count the occurrences of each byte value and apply a <50 line algorithm that has been around since the 1950s and is a pretty standard university assignment. "a very great deal of hard work" indeed.

Presumably division 4A / s47D would now allow the cloning of the data table if decided today -- are you aware of any post-1999 case law?