Copyright would apply to the documentation itself, or the published header files themselves, as works; it wouldn't apply to the API itself.
Mind you, Oracle was suing Google for using the header files themselves; since Google could have easily just typed up their own versions that did the same thing, it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement" case: they shipped something that was exactly from Oracle, rather than just paraphrasing it. Oracle was probably in the right to sue over that.
But re: APIs—there's much more well-resolved case-law for this, coming from the gaming vertical: games have copyright, but game designs (including things like their network protocols) do not. It has both pros (Microsoft can't use the Minecraft IP to sue Terraria or Factorio; people can advance AI by writing bots that play Starcraft) and cons (the iOS and Android stores being saturated with mechanical clones of each successful game) but it's very certainly "the way things are."
Actually, plagiarism and copyright infringement are different things. For example, it is possible to plagiarize something that is not copyrighted, and many forms of copyright infringement wouldn't fit the definition of plagiarism.
True, but the parent seems to think they wouldn't have been plagiarizing if they had "paraphrased" the declaring code so to speak, which makes the relationship here explicit. If they had paraphrased the declaring code, it would have been much harder to say they were infringing on copyright, but instead, they copied it verbatim.
Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.
> Of course, in academia paraphrasing is still plagiarism, but it is likely no longer copyright infringement especially in this case.
That seems an odd thing to say. A significant portion of academic writing is paraphrasing, with attribution. What is a review article, other than attributed paraphrasing?
Mind you, Oracle was suing Google for using the header files themselves; since Google could have easily just typed up their own versions that did the same thing, it's almost more of a "plagiarism" case than a "copyright infringement" case: they shipped something that was exactly from Oracle, rather than just paraphrasing it. Oracle was probably in the right to sue over that.
But re: APIs—there's much more well-resolved case-law for this, coming from the gaming vertical: games have copyright, but game designs (including things like their network protocols) do not. It has both pros (Microsoft can't use the Minecraft IP to sue Terraria or Factorio; people can advance AI by writing bots that play Starcraft) and cons (the iOS and Android stores being saturated with mechanical clones of each successful game) but it's very certainly "the way things are."