Hell, I bet you could live quite a comfortable life on the talk show circuit afterwards anyway. Who the hell needs billions upon billions?

Only a total moron would sacrifice billions for a few million.

If I invented the single most money-making device in over a century, exceeding even personal computers, I wouldn't open source the specs even if I had an established patent.

This invention would make electric cars extremely useful. Eventually people are going to take a peek at it (maintenance and technicians). And if it isn't patented, someone could reverse engineer, manufacture and sell it without paying him anything.

There was nothing about the device itself that was really new, nothing that it could do which you couldn't do as well or better on another phone,

Have you actually tried using a cellphone prior to the iphone? 5 to 7 tiny buttons are all you get to control the device. These multi-button controls are a lot slower than the iphone and require memorization and they are vastly limited in their capabilities and features.

The iphone changed all that... vast number of functions available at a tap of your finger. Most of all, its screen was 3 times larger than a dumbphone. It was a game changer. Google cancelled their Android phone (which at that time looked like a blackberry phone) after seeing the iphone launch, and then copied the iphone.

They're both innovators, with the blood testing inventor doing more work. Whereas Musk recognized a good idea and spent millions backing and managing the production of such cars.

You do realize manufacturing cars requires a ton of capital. All inventions are kinda obvious once you seen them in action and know about their internals.

if you *must* use the API to do that, then the API's copyright is not enforceable against those using it to achieve that functional purpose.

Does Android *have* to use Java APIs to accomplish its tasks? No. They can (and should) design their own APIs, something different from the standard Java API.

If you want to own every way to do achieve a particular functional result, you need a patent.

I assume you're writing about utility patents. Those are given only to unique, not-seen-before type inventions. There is nothing that remarkably inventive about a String, Hashtable or Set class that deserves a patent.

I think APIs deserve a new type of protection, somewhere between copyright and a design patent. Something like this would express exactly what parts of the API can be copied and what parts cannot.

Are you living in the stone ages or the agrarian age? No! All important work done today is intellectual; machines do all the grunt work. So all these people doing intellectual work need to get paid... hence it's illegal downloading.

You're right, when you download a file, the original copy disappears in a cloud of smoke. You've deprived its owner of his copy. That is theft.

You are leeching off people who do pay for the product (an illegal freemium model). So the manufacturer either bears the cost (i.e. takes a hit) or he increases the product price to meet a sales target (in which case you've stolen from legit buyers).

Or worse, if you would never have bought a copy in the first place, then you've stolen the profit the media company would never have made. That is theft.

If you benefit from a commercial product/service that you don't pay for, that is theft. Most packaged products in your grocery/mall store would be worthless if they didn't have huge amount of IP to design and manufacture the product. So what you're paying for is essentially the IP involved in creating these products. If IP is worthless, you should be able to legally shoplift these products by just paying the cost of materials and $0 for any IP costs.

It's important to pay for all copies so that media companies can keep getting rich and not pay the artists because the media companies hold all the rights and make all the money. That is theft.

Why don't people like you buy books/music directly from the authors/musicians' websites and cut out the middlemen (publishers, bookstores)? Anyway, the days of authors/musicians getting only 10-12% are long gone. They can easily make 50-70% by selling their stuff online (via itunes of amazon store).

You can't copyright words (like "tree" or "exclamation") of the English language. You also cannot copyright short phrases (because there's a good chance someone else will come up with it without copying from you). However, anything longer that took some creativity to create is certainly copyrightable.

If you imagine a single method like getID() to be similar to a word (or a short phrase) of the English language, it can't be copyrighted. But when you have hundreds or even thousands of such API declarations that are closely related to each other, some would argue they are similar to a book or a short story and therefore copyrightable.

That was a case of Lexmark trying to copyright the handshake protocol to keep third parties from producing compatible printer cartridges.

Are you stating google apps can't call Linux system APIs except through Java APIs? Java is not a system API... it's a middle layer between the apps and the system.

Since it's copyrighted, but not patented (or patentable), you could redesign Linux or *BSD APIs that are similar in principle and operation as the POSIX APIs, but not a complete copy.

Just because it affects your pet project does not make it legal.

The purpose of copyright is to protect creativity, not work. The "sweat of the brow" doctrine has been rejected [wikipedia.org] by the US Supreme Court. The creativity should be what lies behind the API, not the API itself.

LOLOL, API design creativity is second only to language design creativity. If it was so trivial "sweat of the brow" type issue, why didn't google completely design their own API instead of simply lifting it?

Implementing API can be "sweat of the brow" type work, but designing non-trivial API is difficult without creativity.

The API itself allows for NO creativity, since even the slightest deviation causes it to fail. Therefore APIs should not be copyrightable.

When MS cloned Java as C#, they tweaked the language grammar and keywords, and completely redesigned the API (although it was still inspired by Java API). Why didn't google redesign their API like MS? Your "slightest deviation causes it to fail" argument is bullshit.

Do these restrictions apply to APIs?

* idea - (Abstract) Patents deal with ideas, concrete API code does not.

* procedure, process - The body of code implementing the API is the procedure/process and these are copyrightable.

* system, method of operation - This is again more related to patents and implementing APIs rather than APIs themselves.

concept - No one is trying to protect the concept embodied in the API, just the code.

* principle, or discovery - Aren't books/articles relating to scientific principles (textbooks) and discoveries copyrighted?

That's just 2 functions/methods. What if you designed thousands of methods, classes and their intricate relationships. The API is hit with developers and then a Google-like company simply comes along, takes your API headers, reimplements it, and starts selling products based on your work, without paying you a dime. Do you think that's fair, or legal?

I don't get what all the hype is about. I bought a used model M from ebay, and the keys were much harder to press than a cheap squishy keyboard. It was also quite loud. Disappointed...