[taligent]

I don't think the world would burn if APIs were copyrighted.

There are 'fair use' provisions and most companies would grant carte blanche to people to provide new implementations. I am actually struggling to think of an example other than Java.

[tikhonj]

So it would change nothing. In which case, why have them copyrightable at all? If companies aren't going to take advantage of it anyhow, it seems additionally pointless.

Fundamentally, the main reason to copyright something is to restrict others' use of it. Letting companies restrict their APIs' use would be unfortunate, so if it there is really no effect either way they should not be copyrightable.

[SoftwareMaven]

SCO/Calderra would have loved to be able to claim ownership of libc for all *nix OSes. That's the kind of thing this case could be moving towards. Im sure somebody would love their tithes for SQL, too.

It could get very ugly.