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Beeper vs Apple battle intensifies: Lawmakers demand DOJ investigation - Android Authority
(www.androidauthority.com)
this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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Ah, common misconception - hacking an API != creating a compatible program. ( reverse engineering)
Imagine a drill company has a special shape for its bits. Our law allows someone else to either.. make bits that can fit in that shape OR make their own drill that can accept those bits.
"BUT they copied!" - it doesn't have to be a copy to be compatible, and they don't even have to use the 'special shape' just be able to work with the special shape. The law does not allow for protections around that. Doing so would be by definition anti-competitive. Our anti competition laws or rather our IP protection laws are not intended in any way to 'ensure a monopoly'. The IP laws give a person a right to either keep something they do secret OR share that knowledge with the world so we all benefit, in exchange for a very limited monopoly.
Practically speaking, If I got the KFC Colonel to give me the list of 11 herbs and spices in a Poker game, and then started making my own delicious poultry that is totally cool. Likewise, If I figured out that all that was inside a Threadripper was blue smoke and started making my own blue smoke chips, the law is ok with that.
In this case roughly, Having a public facing endpoint. And then saying that the public can access that endpoint is cool Saying that only the public using the code I alone gave them -- well... that's not been litigated a lot, but all signs point to no.
It's like Bing saying its for Safari only, and suing people who accessed it using Chrome. It is a logical claim, but the law does not provide that kind of protection/enforcement.
tl;dr these concepts are old but being newly applied to fancy technology. The laws in place are clear in most cases. A car maker can not dictate what you put in the tank. FedEX and UPS can't charge you differently for shipping fiction books or medical journals or self published stories. And they'd probably get anti-trust scrutiny they even told you what brand/style of boxes you had to use.