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Comment by saraid216 | Hacker News Reader

I'm fairly sure that languages cannot ever be copyrighted, programming or otherwise.

Can the interpreter be protected by copyright? Technically that is a program, not the language.

Of course. But that doesn't stop anyone from writing their own interpreter that interprets the same language, as long as they don't copy any copyrightable parts of your interpreter to do so.

(Such an interpreter would likely contain a table of function names. The effect of this ruling is to clarify that that set of function names can't be copyrighted, so the alternative implementation of your interpreter can copy it. We already knew that the names themselves couldn't be copyrighted, but this ruling clarifies that also the "structure, sequence and organsiation" of those function names can't be copyrighted either.)

This still seems like pretty good protection for someone who has written an interpreter that performs "the best" vis-a-vis any clones. From the end user/customer's perspective, who cares how the function's interface/arguments are structured? What matters is how well the functions are written and thus how well the interpreter, and the programs it runs, perform. Of course, programmers might care about how well interfaces are designed, but unfortunately we can't sue people for crappy interfaces.

Well, from the end-user's perspective they care very much that the clone can provide the same functions organised in the same way as the original, because otherwise their scripts that run on the original interpreter won't run on the clone.

But yes, the underlying implementation is still subject to copyright (and potentially, patent). You can't copyright the fact that your scripting language has an operator spelled >< that concatenates strings, but you can copyright your particular code that performs string concatenation.

Yes, same functionality. I only meant the implementation, the code. Let's take an example: The APL and APL-related languages. IBM and some other old companies have been licensing these "languages" for many years. But what are people really licensing? Not the language. If we agree that languages are not protectatble, then no one needs permission to use a language. (What the licensee is really paying for is the use of an interpreter and perhaps support/consulting.) But how many programmers understand this distinction?

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