Copyright

API copyright is the political fight that determined whether the entire open, interoperable software world would remain legal — and I was in it from the beginning to the end, signing the briefs, writing the arguments, and watching the case wind its way to the Supreme Court. The question at the heart of it was deceptively simple: can an API interface be copyrighted? Can a company own the design of how software talks to other software, and use that ownership to control who’s allowed to build compatible systems? The answer mattered enormously, because the freedom to reimplement an API — to build a system that speaks the same interface as another — is exactly what produced the interoperable software and hardware industries we all depend on. If API interfaces could be locked up by copyright, the openness that the whole digital economy rests on would have been in jeopardy. I spent the better part of a decade arguing that API designs must remain free from copyright, because the stakes were nothing less than the legality of interoperability itself.

The foundational legal reality, which surprised a lot of people, is that APIs had technically been copyrightable for decades before anyone fought about it. I wrote in 2012 that APIs had been copyrightable for 22 years — a 1989 case had established the theoretical possibility, but the industry had mostly ignored it and operated as though API interfaces were free to reimplement. That informal freedom was exactly what enabled the great acts of interoperability in computing history: UNIX reimplementations, the IBM PC BIOS being cloned to create the PC-compatible industry, the C language, countless compatible systems built by speaking an existing interface. The whole industry had been built on the assumption that you could reimplement an API, and that assumption had never really been tested in court — until Oracle decided to test it.

Oracle v. Google was the case that put it all on the line, and it became the most consequential legal fight in the history of APIs. Oracle sued Google over Google’s reimplementation of the Java APIs in Android — Google had written its own implementation but used the same API interface so that Java developers could build on Android. Oracle claimed this reimplementation infringed its copyright on the Java APIs. I wrote about the case from 2013 onward, framing it as fundamentally about copyright versus fair use, and explaining why the outcome would shape every API. If Oracle won, reimplementing an API would require permission from the original API’s owner, which would have given incumbents enormous power to lock up their interfaces and prevent compatible competition. The case wasn’t really about Oracle and Google; it was about whether interoperability would remain a right or become a privilege granted by whoever owned the dominant API.

I didn’t just write about the case — I participated in it, signing onto the EFF amicus briefs again and again. I wrote in 2012 about helping EFF make the case for no copyright on APIs, and in 2014 about my continued support as a signer of the Oracle v. Google amicus brief from EFF. The computer scientists’ briefs, the EFF briefs, the arguments urging the courts to keep API interfaces free — I was part of that effort because I believed, and still believe, that the freedom to reimplement existing APIs is foundational to a healthy software industry. The brief I kept signing made the historical case: that the freedom to build compatible systems by reimplementing interfaces is what produced robust software and hardware industries, and that allowing API interfaces to be copyrighted would foreclose the interoperability that the entire field depends on. This wasn’t abstract for me; it was a political fight I was actively engaged in, on the side of openness.

The restaurant menu analogy is how I made the argument accessible, and it’s the explanation I’m proudest of. I wrote in 2014, and returned to it several times, that an API design is the menu, not the restaurant. The menu tells you what you can order; the real value and the real intellectual property are in the kitchen, the ingredients, the recipes, the service — the implementation behind the interface. The menu just describes what’s available. You can’t copyright a restaurant menu’s basic structure and use it to prevent every other restaurant from offering “a cheeseburger” — and you shouldn’t be able to copyright an API interface and use it to prevent everyone else from offering a compatible service. The analogy clarified the crucial distinction between an API’s design (the menu, which should be free) and its implementation (the kitchen, which is genuinely protectable). I argued that if you can’t see the separation between an API and its design, you either don’t understand APIs well enough or you’re too focused on monetization and control.

The deeper political framing I came to, beyond the specific case, was that API copyright is part of a larger enclosure of the commons driven by the relentless expansion of intellectual property law. By the time the case headed to the Supreme Court, which I wrote about in 2019, I’d come to see API copyright as one instance of a broader pattern: large corporations using intellectual property law to reduce every form of creativity and expression down to an ownable transaction. The API copyright fight was a front in the larger battle over whether the shared infrastructure of how software interoperates would remain a commons or become enclosed property. I also made a pointed argument in 2015 that APIs would not ultimately be suffocated by Oracle and the courts — they’d be suffocated by each of us not sharing our API designs, not contributing to the commons, not defending the openness that makes interoperability possible. The legal fight mattered, but so did the everyday choices of whether to keep API designs open.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled in Google’s favor in 2021, finding the reimplementation to be fair use, and that outcome preserved the openness the API economy depends on. My Oracle v. Google copyright journey, which I reflected on in 2021, spanned nearly a decade of engagement with the case — and the relief at the outcome was real, because a different ruling would have been catastrophic for interoperability. But the deeper lesson I take from the whole saga is that the openness we depend on is not guaranteed; it has to be defended. API copyright was a genuine threat to the freedom to build compatible systems, beaten back only through years of legal effort and advocacy. The freedom to reimplement an API — the freedom that produced the entire interoperable software industry — survived, but it survived because people fought for it. The political truth of API copyright is that the commons of how software interoperates is perpetually under threat from the enclosure instinct, and that defending it requires vigilance, advocacy, and a willingness to fight cases like Oracle v. Google all the way to the Supreme Court. The menu stayed free, this time. But the instinct to copyright the menu, to enclose the commons, to turn the shared infrastructure of interoperability into ownable property, never goes away — and neither can the work of defending against it.

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