To pick a name is creative. To use that name afterword is not - it's literally referring to something by its given name.
My mother was being creative, you're just reading my business card.
> Even minor things like order of operands are creative choices.
They can be. But where they're standardized, they aren't.
If the API specifies these things they're now functional.
> An API is not just a "listing of resources.
Actually, that's all it is. The implementation lives somewhere else.
> It involves all sorts of creative choices in terms of what abstractions to expose, how to expose them, etc.
Right, and the API itself is a non-creative listing of them.
I'm not violating copyright by telling you that one of the characters in Harry Potter is named Dumbledore, nor would I be if I listed all the characters and the facts about them, despite that by necessity as a work of fiction they're all creative.