[scott_s]

The mechanism for how you access an API is not important. I see no meaningful difference between including a file and accessing classes and methods, and communicating with a Twitter server and using their RESTful interface. It's also a copyright claim, not a patent claim.

The fundamental problem I see with the Twitter example is that Oracle is not, as far as I know, claiming that programs that use their Java API (classes and methods) are in copyright violation. They are claiming that implementing that API is a copyright violation. The only way to make an analogy with Twitter would be for someone to set up a similar service that implements the same API to communicate with it - that is, you could point your application to this new, Twitter-like service and everything would still work.

[joe_the_user]

The example might not be analogous to the initial situation but the possibilities for abuse would certainly extend to the example of a client implementing an api - if you copyright a server side api or a single computer api, you can copyright the client side of an api as well.