Quote:
Originally Posted by fjtorres
Patent protection would be worse.
Copyrighted material can be legally reverse-engineered via clean-room code development. Patented material, it's not that easy; you can't replicate the same process with different code. Instead you have to achieve the same result via a different process. (Think: Type 1 vs TrueType.)
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There's no way to clean-room reverse engineer an API. There is no code in an API. It's just a specification of the functions provided and the parameters to those functions. You use the API when you're doing clean-room reverse engineering. Allowing copyright over APIs prevents any kind of emulation of software.