EU's top court: APIs can't be copyrighted

Posted by carlitos_esquer on May 7, 2012 9:50 PM EDT
ars technica; By Timothy B. Lee
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"The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces (APIs) and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality—and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said."

As you can see, at least the European inhabitants have from today more rights than us in this side of the world. The text of the ruling even disallows to be bounded by license and other contract terms wich are called "null and void". Everyone which follows the oracle vs google case, sees a grand victory for google, because as Judge Alsup says in his comments.

"Among other things, he asked the parties to weigh in on the implications of this week's EU court decision that allowing functional characteristics of programming languages to be copyrighted would "monopolize" ideas"

And that's the question, can be APIs be copyrighted, or are these ideas which anyone who has sufficient understanding on the matter can use for implementantions?

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Subject Topic Starter Replies Views Last Post
Very interesting tracyanne 17 1,451 May 8, 2012 9:40 PM

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