It has always seemed to me that a good analogy for the API situation would be the design of typefaces (as distinct from a particular implementation of that design through, for example, instructions in a font file), which receives special treatment in US law and is not subject to copyright in that jurisdiction.
As far as I can see (but please note that I am not even in the US, never mind a legal scholar) the relevant US law is 37 CFR § 202.1 about “Material not subject to copyright” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1). This enumerates several cases that are explicitly excluded from copyright protection. One is “typeface as typeface”, which was apparently interpreted as described above in a litigated case (Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer).
An argument has certainly been made, though I can’t immediately find the original source, that this exclusion is justified because of the utilitarian nature of a typeface design: allowing one party to control all use of it would be against the public interest, because ultimately that principle could allow for all printed communication to become controlled.
It seems to me that APIs fulfil a similar purpose. They are not useful in themselves, lacking a corresponding implementation. They are, however, an essential basis for standardisation, interoperability and communication between practitioners.
Under 202.1(b) of the law cited above, another class of works excluded from copyright protection is “Ideas, plans, methods, systems, or devices, as distinguished from the particular manner in which they are expressed or described in a writing”. I wonder whether a similar argument about the utilitarian nature of APIs as a specification distinct from its implementation could be made based on that.
As far as I can see (but please note that I am not even in the US, never mind a legal scholar) the relevant US law is 37 CFR § 202.1 about “Material not subject to copyright” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1). This enumerates several cases that are explicitly excluded from copyright protection. One is “typeface as typeface”, which was apparently interpreted as described above in a litigated case (Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer).
An argument has certainly been made, though I can’t immediately find the original source, that this exclusion is justified because of the utilitarian nature of a typeface design: allowing one party to control all use of it would be against the public interest, because ultimately that principle could allow for all printed communication to become controlled.
It seems to me that APIs fulfil a similar purpose. They are not useful in themselves, lacking a corresponding implementation. They are, however, an essential basis for standardisation, interoperability and communication between practitioners.
Under 202.1(b) of the law cited above, another class of works excluded from copyright protection is “Ideas, plans, methods, systems, or devices, as distinguished from the particular manner in which they are expressed or described in a writing”. I wonder whether a similar argument about the utilitarian nature of APIs as a specification distinct from its implementation could be made based on that.