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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

The idea that so much existing infrastructure would infringe on this new kind of copyright is tough to accept, but at least it's very straightforward in a way, with brutal direct consequences.

What I have more of a problem with is that we have no clear precedents for how API copyright will work in practice if it is suddenly foisted upon the real world. What does it mean for an API to be licensed under the GPLv2, or any other copyright license that was written with source code and object code in mind but not APIs? How will we determine which license agreements executed long ago should be retroactively considered to include or exclude the APIs? How many industry standards will have to be assessed for whether the relevant APIs are available under FRAND licensing terms as the relevant patents usually are? Is there a distinction between providing vs using an API, for the purposes of determining copyright infringement?

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In order to get insight in that future I look to examples close to API. One such area is proprietary standard documents that covers proprietary protocols. What does it mean for a protocol to be proprietary? Usually that a single company control all the software that communicate with each other under that protocol. Software stacks became platform for that vendor, and Microsoft was infamous in using this technique in binding people to the Microsoft ecosystem in the previous two decades. However in recent time DRM has been used to create a similar effect and companies has started to abandon the idea of preventing others from creating protocol compatibility by hiding how the protocol works or by burying it in legal swamps. If you want a walled garden you just put in cryptographic verification tests at the client, server and hardware level.

Using DRM for a programming language in order to create a walled garden is a bit harder. We can imagine a Java 2.0 (evil version) where the byte code has DRM that checks for unauthorized java compilers, but it won't work if the physical programmer can choose to move to a new platform. DRM can thus not create a wall garden for a programming language unless there is legal walls that prevent a competitor to create a compatible platform.

> The idea that so much existing infrastructure would infringe on this new kind of copyright is tough to accept, but at least it's very straightforward in a way, with brutal direct consequences.

I don't anticipate a doom-and-gloom scenario if APIs were all-of-a-sudden copyrightable. Today, open source software is backed by powerful companies, and there is far less lock-in to any particular set of software functionality. The likely outcome is that big tech companies would just cross-license their basic APIs like Win32, SQL, NTFS, POSIX-like functionality, and other basic interface layers.

Today in 2020, the value is not in the interface, but data. Facebook probably wouldn't care if you created a clone that used the same API structure. But if you started imported their user data, you could expect a lawsuit.

Your best case scenario is that hardly anyone attempts to follow in the footsteps of a resounding Oracle success, and that everyone in the industry is saddled with huge potential liabilities until a massive multi-year relicensing project can be completed to confirm who is committed to never trying Oracle's tactics when they fall on hard times. That is a doom and gloom scenario for anyone who takes legal threats seriously and doesn't have an IBM-class mutually assured destruction IP portfolio. It's postulating a series of events that leaves us with most of the software industry intact, but for the most part would still be a scenario where the only true winners are the lawyers.

> everyone in the industry is saddled with huge potential liabilities until a massive multi-year relicensing project can be completed to confirm who is committed to never trying Oracle's tactics when they fall on hard times. That is a doom and gloom scenario for anyone who takes legal threats seriously and doesn't have an IBM-class mutually assured destruction IP portfolio.

This multi-year cross licensing project wouldn't be a big impediment. It happens all the time in standards setting organizations, and wouldn't slow down progress significantly.

The worst case scenario would be trolls somehow obtaining the copyright to a foundational API and collecting money from everyone. That would be a pretty big annoyance, but that too would't be a doomsday scenario. Patent trolls have been active for decades and have had minimal impact on overall progress.

> The worst case scenario would be trolls somehow obtaining the copyright to a foundational API and collecting money from everyone.

That's a funny misspelling of GAFA+Microsoft+IBM.

"Patent trolls have been active for decades and have had minimal impact on overall progress."

Where did you get this from? It's mighty hard to quantify what might have been. Patent trolls disproportionately affect small organizations that are not on anyone's radar unless and until they deliver. They die with not a roar but a whisper.

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