I honestly admire the honesty here. In some ways it reads like an honest theft, but it's not. It's indeed how copyright works and thus far how it should work. It is true that things have changed and the economy is much different today. Following it it's a nature evolution indeed. This can mean copyright requires some changes, too, as everyone is updating the copyright law in the era of AI. This is no different from that.

It's legal right now. It should be in the foreseen future. But how far?

Quoting the closing clause:

> [...] maintained by a generation of developers who believed that sharing code was its own reward and have been comprehensively proven right about the sharing and wrong about the reward.
>
> We owe them a debt we have no intention of repaying. But we do, at least, have the decency to say thank you.
>
> So: thank you. Truly. We'll take it from here.

@godfat I don’t like it.

However, the question is can APIs be copyrighted? What about the documentation that is the specification?

So it maybe legal, it just feels wrong.

There have to be better approaches than the one they’re talking.

@mlevison As far as I understand, APIs cannot be copyrighted, see Google vs Oracle for Java API on Android.

I am not sure about documentation that is specification. The precise words are copyright protected, but not the "idea". So technically if someone who writes it in a completely different manner, words, paragraphs, presentation, etc, that would not violate copyright.

There are a lot of gray areas for sure, like left-pad, it's too simple, which is too easy to come up with the same thing.