| 7 Jan 2026 |
 emily | we use cloud providers located in the US | 14:33:53 |
| emily | other jurisdictions don't really matter for us | 14:34:01 |
| emily | (we redistribute stuff that is encumbered by software patents in the US so in practice we just follow EU rules) | 14:35:02 |
 Randy Eckenrode | I have a different take on Google vs. Oracle. The court only ruled that Google’s use of the Java APIs was fair use regardless of whether APIs could be copyrighted. It didn’t address that issue. I’d prefer they not be, but the lower court did find they were, and I don’t trust the courts to make the right decision should that question come up again. | 14:55:36 |
| Randy Eckenrode | * | 14:55:53 |
| emily | OTOH I believe the EU is much clearer about APIs being uncopyrightable | 15:18:00 |
| emily | and we'd have to stop distributing FFmpeg if going by US rules | 15:18:23 |
| emily | (I agree Oracle v. Google didn't rule APIs either copyrightable or uncopyrightable - though it did adopt a very expansive definition for fair use of them that Nixpkgs would easily meet IMO) | 15:19:16 |
| emily | https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/PDF/?uri=CELEX:32009L0024 articles 1(2), 5(3) and 6 are relevant here | 15:27:40 |
| emily | https://kempitlaw.com/insights/apis-software-copyright-in-2021-a-view-from-each-side-of-the-pond/ has some commentary | 15:28:54 |
| emily | 6 legitimizes @reckenrode:matrix.org's disassembling constants too, too bad about his jurisdiction 😆 | 15:30:47 |
| emily | I think in the limit (6) would legitimize linking against the Xcode libclang and driving it to reproduce all the header declarations including the names required for interoperability | 15:33:52 |
| emily | which would be exceedingly silly but hey | 15:34:01 |
| emily | btw Mozilla explicitly tell people to copy declarations out of SDK headers and vend them in Firefox source: https://firefox-source-docs.mozilla.org/widget/cocoa/macos-apis.html | 15:35:50 |
| emily | although the author seems confused about TBDs | 15:36:17 |
| Randy Eckenrode | The problem with fair use is it’s a defense you have to assert. You’d still have to go through with the case if someone wanted to sue. | 15:42:07 |
| Randy Eckenrode | They fell off a truck. 🥸 | 15:43:24 |
| emily | applies even if we had a blanket "all APIs are uncopyrightable" ruling, right? they can always sue you and argue about whether the header file contents or Swift interface files or whatever constitute "uncopyrightable APIs" | 15:45:01 |
| emily | nothing you can do to stop anyone suing you ultimately | 15:45:30 |
|  @masrlinu:matrix.org left the room. | 15:45:55 |
| emily | I do think the fact that we treat the cache as being under EU law is more relevant though, yesh | 15:46:10 |
| emily | * | 15:46:15 |
| emily | Oracle v. Google mostly matters for American users doing weird stuff or mirrors | 15:46:42 |
| Randy Eckenrode | If we had an “APIs are not copyrightable” ruling, I assume it would be possible to argue that there’s no case and get it dismissed. | 15:46:46 |
| emily | I can imagine a "well Swift is different from Java you know, we are the experts after all!" 😅 | 15:47:21 |
| emily | but yeah agreed that the line is further out because of that | 15:47:39 |
 eveeifyeve | So would it be considered fair use? If so do I still link the licence or just have license.publicDomain? | 15:48:32 |
| emily | "we are not even reimplementing like Google did, this is pure interoperability for use with Apple hardware and software" is also pretty strong otoh. | 15:48:47 |
| eveeifyeve | Because it is important to have a meta.license if it's public domain and also a comment explaining the reasons to it. | 15:50:24 |
| eveeifyeve | * Because it is important to have a meta.license if it's uncopyrightable/fair use and also a comment explaining the reasons to it. | 15:50:43 |
