Jeff Dean

I was very pleased to be one of 77 computer scientists that signed this amici curiae brief that the +Electronic Frontier Foundation filed with the Supreme Court, arguing that APIs should not be copyrightable.

(Plus one if you agree with this sentiment!)

The list of signatories starts on p. 38 of the PDF linked to by the page below (direct access to the PDF, if you prefer, is via https://www.eff.org/document/amicus-brief-computer-scientists-scotus).

Signatories include (those for whom I could easily find a G+ account)

+vint cerf +Joshua Bloch +Dan Boneh +Eric Brewer +Rick Cattell +Will Cook +Ward Cunningham +Mark Davis +Jeff Dean (me) +Brendan Eich +Dave Farber +Stuart Feldman +Ed Felten +Martin Fowler +Miguel de Icaza +John Hennessy +Mitch Kapor +Ray Kurzweil +Ed Lazowska +Doug Lea +Barbara Liskov +martin odersky +Peter Norvig +Simon Phipps +Bill Pugh +Guido van Rossum +Bruce Schneier +Curtis Schroeder  +Barbara Simons +Dave Snigier +Alfred Spector +Bjarne Stroustrup +Brad Templeton +Michael Tiemann +Andrew Tridgell +Josh Triplett +Jeffrey Ullman +Jan Vitek +Jim Waldo +Dan Wallach +Frank Yellin 

I signed in a personal capacity, but for full disclosure: the brief relates to a lower court decision in a case of Google v. Oracle, and I am a Google employee.  However, even if I weren’t a Google employee, I would have signed on to this brief, as I think copyrighting APIs would be very harmful for innovation. 

Computer Scientists Ask Supreme Court to Rule APIs Can’t Be Copyrighted

Blair Christian November 11, 2014 06:18

That’s pretty interesting.  I have been reading up on what data is in the legal sense lately.  According to a law professor friend, it’s kind of a hot area right now: “Is Data Speech?” ( http://www.stanfordlawreview.org/sites/default/files/66_Stan._L_Rev_57_Bambauer.pdf ) and “Algorithms and Speech” (http://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1020&context=penn_law_review)

Imported from Google+ — content and formatting may not be reliable