API's Can't Be Copywrighted

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Paul Boniol

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Apr 5, 2021, 11:29:10 AM4/5/21
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The Supreme Court has ruled that API's can't be copyrighted, which I believe is correct. It was a 4-3 decision, so it came pretty close to going the other way, which I concur with those saying it would have set off a huge wave of terrible lawsuits.

Paul Boniol

Kent Perrier

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Apr 5, 2021, 11:32:32 AM4/5/21
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On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 10:29 AM Paul Boniol <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
The Supreme Court has ruled that API's can't be copyrighted, which I believe is correct. It was a 4-3 decision, so it came pretty close to going the other way, which I concur with those saying it would have set off a huge wave of terrible lawsuits.

Paul Boniol

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Tilghman Lesher

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Apr 5, 2021, 11:59:48 AM4/5/21
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Not quite. The Supreme Court *punted* on the question of whether APIs
can be copyrighted, but instead narrowly said that reimplementing the
API is fair use. This may or may not be significant. I suspect that
in some future case, where a defendant tries to limit their damages
for copying an entire copyrighted work (by suggesting that they
shouldn't be penalized for copying the APIs), the Court will find that
they are copyrightable and penalize that defendant accordingly.

On Mon, Apr 5, 2021 at 10:29 AM Paul Boniol <paul....@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The Supreme Court has ruled that API's can't be copyrighted, which I believe is correct. It was a 4-3 decision, so it came pretty close to going the other way, which I concur with those saying it would have set off a huge wave of terrible lawsuits.
>
> Paul Boniol
>
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Tilghman

Michael L

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Apr 5, 2021, 1:49:47 PM4/5/21
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Court decision works for me.

Rhetorical comment here:  When Tilghman mentioned ABI in recent email, it was the first I ever heard of ABI.  I know the acronym API, but I probably don't understand much past the acronym what an API actually is or how programmers use one.  It astounds me how much I get exposed to just by getting to read the emails.  I believe Redhat was in the same conversation and after seeing Ubu20 work well and messing up the well working Ubu18 with a not so good upgrade to Ubu20, I tried Fedora 33 and am thinking I'm seeing less crashes and non-responds than with Ubuntu 18.  I'm running the memory intensive Wolfram Mathematica along with over a dozen Brave browser and Firefox tabs and several LibreOffice documents / spreadsheets and am not seeing the system freeze up but rarely; it's a 12GB RAM Acer laptop with AMD A9 processor.

On the topic of Redhat and CentOS, maybe openSUSE Leap will fill the void,

CentOS seemed to me to be the popular choice for running a web server.  If anyone has a recommended alternative, I'll take said recommendation.

  M




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