manner.

By observing many programs that use a given API, it is possible to infer

the typical usages, as well the required contracts and directives.[58] Then,
templates can be used to generate natural language from the mined data.

Dispute over copyright protection for APIs

Main article: Google LLC v. Oracle America, Inc.
In 2010, Oracle Corporation sued Google for having distributed a new implementation
of Java embedded in the Android operating system.[59] Google had not acquired any
permission to reproduce the Java API, although permission had been given to the
similar OpenJDK project. Judge William Alsup ruled in the Oracle v. Google case
that APIs cannot be copyrighted in the U.S. and that a victory for Oracle would
have widely expanded copyright protection to a "functional set of symbols" and
allowed the copyrighting of simple software commands:

To accept Oracle's claim would be to allow anyone to copyright one version of code
to carry out a system of commands and thereby bar all others from writing its
different versions to carry out all or part of the same commands.[60][61]

Alsup's ruling was overturned in 2014 on appeal to the Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit, though the question of whether such use of APIs constitutes fair
use was left unresolved.[62][63]

In 2016, following a two-week trial, a jury determined that Google's

reimplementation of the Java API constituted fair use, but Oracle vowed to appeal
the decision.[64] Oracle won on its appeal, with the Court of Appeals for the
Federal Circuit ruling that Google's use of the APIs did not qualify for fair use.
[65] In 2019, Google appealed to the Supreme Court of the United States over both
the copyrightability and fair use rulings, and the Supreme Court granted review.
[66] Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the oral hearings in the case were delayed until
October 2020.[67]

The case was decided by the Supreme Court in Google's favor.[68]

Examples
Main category: Application programming interfaces
ASPI for SCSI device interfacing
Cocoa and Carbon for the Macintosh
DirectX for Microsoft Windows
EHLLAPI
Java APIs
ODBC for Microsoft Windows
OpenAL cross-platform sound API
OpenCL cross-platform API for general-purpose computing for CPUs & GPUs
OpenGL cross-platform graphics API
OpenMP API that supports multi-platform shared memory multiprocessing programming
in C, C++, and Fortran on many architectures, including Unix and Microsoft Windows
platforms.
Server Application Programming Interface (SAPI)
Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)
See also
API testing
API writer
Augmented web
Calling convention
Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA)
Comparison of application virtual machines
Document Object Model (DOM)
Double-chance function
Foreign function interface
Front and back ends
Interface (computing)
Interface control document
List of 3D graphics APIs
Microservices
Name mangling
Open API
Open Service Interface Definitions
Parsing
Plugin
RAML (software)
Software development kit (SDK)
Web API
Web content vendor
XPCOM
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