On: Oracle copied Amazon’s API – was that copyright in...

[gregorygoc]

Can I patent open/read/write/close methods? I might have an idea for the greatest troll in modern era.

[Spivak → gregorygoc]

No, because a patent would only cover your novel implementation of those functions.

You can't copyright them either in the same way that Harry Potter is copyrighted but not the word 'the' which is used throughout.

[jess-sch → gregorygoc]

At least for close(), I'm very much in favor. Maybe that would push more languages to implement automatic destructors.

(More realistically though, it'd unfortunately mostly result in mass renaming to .destroy())