Yes, copywritten isn't a word, but their point was that Oracle pushed for API's to be copywritable, which was not the case before their suit. It's an incredibly bad result with many shitty implications that are currently mostly being ignored but could lead to legal nuclear war at any time.
> It's an incredibly bad result with many shitty implications that are currently mostly being ignored but could lead to legal nuclear war at any time.
I mean, it has been big news, and it has already been nuclear war, with Oracle putting Google in a position to switch android from Dalvik (and successors) to OpenJDK. I agree that it could become a pretty horrible precedent (imagine if Microsoft forbade Sun from implementing Excel functions in StarOffice, or for that matter, if MS were prevented from producing Excel in the first place).
> imagine if Microsoft forbade Sun from implementing Excel functions in StarOffice, or for that matter, if MS were prevented from producing Excel in the first place
The things you're talking about are already protected by patents, and the copyrightability of APIs have nothing to do with them. At the very least, for something to be copyrightable it must be some specific fixed expression (a piece of text, image, video or audio). So the O v. G ruling applies only to actual (code) APIs; not to protocols (or REST "APIs") and certainly not to stuff that's already protected by patents (the distinction between the two may not always make sense to programmers, but it is what it is; for example, algorithms are patentable but not copyrightable, while programs are copyrightable but not patentable).
