If I had to explain the issue at stake here, I'd do it this way.<p>Imagine you go into a fast-food restaurant. "I'd like a burger," you say to the cashier. You get a burger. The next day, you go to a different restaurant. "I'd like a taco," you say. They bring you a taco.<p>Just then, a lawyer bursts in. "I'm sorry, but my client, the burger restaurant, has a copyright on that. No other restaurant is allowed to accept orders in the form of 'I'd like a(n) X'".<p>Would that be crazy?<p>APIs are the computer equivalent. If you go to a blog and request a page like 'someblog.com/posts', then you go to a movie theater's site and request a page like 'moviesite.com/movies', you wouldn't think of those two actions as having anything in common. Sure, both sites use a url like '/items' to serve up that kind of item. Why wouldn't they?<p>But if the courts rule that APIs can be copyrighted, the movie site might either have to license the right to have URLs like '/movies', or do something else.<p>What else? Whatever they can think of - and think of it first. Because the race will be on to copyright every imaginable scheme. '/show/me/movies' and '/movies=all' and '/3932939' will soon be taken. Even if they can come up with a new convention, they'll likely be in court for the right to use it.<p>Does that sound good for consumers - ostensibly the ones whom intellectual property laws should benefit? Does it sound good for new businesses who don't have legal departments?<p>Or would it be crazy?
What about hardware registers such as the layout for memory-mapped I/O? You know, "write value X to byte offset Y to switch the device into state Z."<p>If that's copyrightable, the Linux kernel is basically one big copyright violation, because I'm sure a lot of the device driver writers weren't given a license...
1. Music, etc (anything that can be formally described by a markup language)<p>2. DNA sequences<p>3. Anything subject to algebraic expression<p>4. Proofs and Arguments (_Paley's_ Divinewatcher, _Descarte's_ Mind-Body Problem, _Nozick's_ Experience Machine, _Gödel's_ Incompleteness Proof)<p>5. Programmatic Techniques for manipulating one's own brain<p>6. Expression of physical laws<p>7. E=MC^2, Gravity, etc. (assuming God is a "Programmer of Nature")<p>8. Personality types (fitting analytic descriptions; Analytic/Description Psychology, Jungian psychology, "narrative psychology"), because eventually:<p>9. Neural Networks, and the like<p>10. The Universe itself<p>(11. Historically rooted chess strategies (the notation as a historical marker of creativity in time))<p>(12. Just about anything that might exist within the domain of W3C Provenance)<p>((13. Anything conceptually dependent on _techne_))
IIRC The last version of Sun's 'ls' command used every upper and lower case character as an option flag.<p>Oracle now owns Sun and so has copyright on every upper and lower case letter ( at least when used as an option flag)