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Comment by speedplane | 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.

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.

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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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