[print]

Moving beyond the multiple typos, broken English, and weird linebreaks, which are extremely distracting and majorly detract from the author's points --

Author's analogy (Prop. APIs == Patents) is completely false.

    These juridical and technical restrictions and 
    business dependance [sic] with specific licensing
    defined by ToS are a new kind of patent.

I call bullshit! If anything, APIs are protected by copyright law, which prevents copying.

Not to mention that a patent is protected by the state (hint: that's why it's called the United States Patent and Trademark Office), whereas Terms of Service are contracts between private parties that are entered into voluntarily.

The basic right of a patent is that of exclusion -- i.e., excluding others from "practicing" your invention (usually defined as producing, offering for sale, or importing).

However, if you don't like some company's API, there are perfectly legal ways to clone the backend service and construct an API that is basically identical.

If there is a monopoly power on behalf of proprietary APIs, it's created by market inertia and NOT by a state-granted artificial legal monopoly.

I'm getting a little sick of non-lawyers getting away with posting stupid analogies with linkbaity titles. If you want to attack the patent system, fine. But please, for the love of God, do 10 minutes of research first.

[pessimizer]

>there are perfectly legal ways to clone the backend service and construct an API that is basically identical.

>If there is a monopoly power on behalf of proprietary APIs, it's created by market inertia and NOT by a state-granted artificial legal monopoly.

Or it's created by the investment necessary to retool everything to work with a "basically identical" API which cannot be substantially identical. I wonder if they'll be a market for people that come up with synonyms so that companies offering an identical service with entirely different codebase can avoid duplicating copyrighted calls. Maybe we can download shims from torrent sites?

[print]

I'm not sure what you're getting at -- copying an API interface is allowed, because API interfaces are not copyrightable see Oracle v. Google.

[LesZedCB]

API: Application Program Interface.

There is nothing other than the interface of an API to copy. That's what it is.

However, the implementation is what copyright protects, so, honestly, I think this whole article is not very relevant.

[print]

Yes, my point is that "the API" as in the interface itself can be the copied, but "the API" (implementation) cannot. Clear? :)

[onemorepassword]

I love how can argue that APIs are protected by copyright law but claim that that is not a "state-granted artificial legal monopoly".