[AnthonyMouse]

>An API is not a compilation of facts, though. The specific names in an API and their relationships to each other seem like a creative work.

The trouble is that it is a compilation of facts. "There is a function in Java called lastIndexOf in class java.lang.String that takes int as argument and returns int." That's a fact. The formal specification of that fact is "public int lastIndexOf(int)" -- that can't be a creative expression of the fact because it's the only way you can formally represent it to the compiler. The language mandates that expression; you can't alter it so there is no opportunity for creativity.

Or to put it a different way, you might want to call it a creative endeavor to lay out a city and name all the streets. But if the person who named all the streets then comes around trying to claim a copyright over an independent cartographer's map of the city or the local phone book because it contains all of the street names, I wouldn't expect much sympathy.

But I think the crux of it is this:

>Someone invented that.

Exactly. Software development contains both engineering and creative components. The functional components are patentable (in countries like the US that have software patents). The creative components are copyrightable. But the API is strictly functional -- if there is any protection for it, it's in the domain of patents. You can call inventions creative all you like, but you can't copyright function.

[uxp]

This makes me think of WINE. WINE takes the direct API, as in all the doSomethings(), and rewrites how it does that thing to work on a different environment than the original API call intended it to do. In the end, it may have the same exact or near exact result, but it does it in a completely different way.

I'd fear that if Oracle wins here, a huge number of open source projects like Wine and even the Gnash Flash alternative would find themselves under attack when they had previously been determined outside of court to be legitimate and fair uses of an API reimplementation.

[AnthonyMouse]

Absolutely. I mean forget about WINE, what about SQL? Recall that SQL originally came out of IBM. It kind of makes you wonder whether Oracle's lawyers have thought this one through.