Re: IBM BIOS replication
Then you don't know what an API is. It doesn't depend on a header (only certain languages use them, I don't recall ever needing one in FORTRAN for instance). Any other text, is by definition, not copyrightable. Assembler is in fact a language. It may be written in hexadecimal and not look like English, but that doesn't mean it not a language. If the API were copyrightable, then the IBM BIOS could not have been reimplemented. The API is simply the related structure and function signatures that allow disparate programs to get the same functionality on the same system.
If I write an MS-DOS program, it'll run on an IBM-DOS computer. If I write a Java SE program with the Oracle SDK it will run under the Oracle JRE, or any of a number of OpenJDK JREs. If I write an application under Sun's Glassfish server it will run under Apache's Tomcat server. The list goes on and on. This is only possible because APIs have until now been recognized as uncopywritable.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
