Kein Urheberrecht für APIs!

Eine Regulierung von Plattformen jeglicher Art muss die Abschwächung von Netzwerkeffekten zum Kern haben. Ein wichtiger Punkt: APIs (Programmierschnittstellen) möglichst jegliche Exklusivität nehmen.

Reverse Engineering von APIs macht zum Beispiel Mulithoming sehr viel einfacher.

Urheberrechtlich geschützte APIs würden das sofort unmöglich machen. Schlimmer noch: Es würde (ebenso wie im Kulturbereich) alles Alte und Neue per Default auf Monopol und Exklusivität setzen.

Mike Masnick schreibt auf Techdirt über eine Petition: „If You Think Google Is Too Dominant And Needs More Competition… You Should Actually Support Its Petition Concerning API Copyrights“:

I’ve been talking a lot lately about the concept of protocols over platforms as a way to limit the dominance of giant platforms — indeed, it’s the only reasonable way I can see of leading to real competition in a world of network effects. Any traditional „break up“ plan doesn’t work, because you can’t „break up“ a global network in the same way you could break up many historical companies. But, what you can do is get them to open up their APIs or to make it easier to get data out of their systems in a way that is interoperable with other platforms.

But that’s much, much harder if APIs are locked down with copyright, as Oracle is pushing for. To be fair, Google itself has always been much more open than lots of other companies in similar situations, but if we want true adversarial interoperability, as Cory Doctorow has highlighted, one way to help that along is to make sure that APIs can’t be locked down, and that reverse engineering compatibility is free for anyone. That’s how you build true competition — and Oracle’s case might shut down that important avenue.