There is a mistake in the article

Re: Copyright

"Defeat could potentially allow an extension of copyright into previously undisputed areas, such as programming languages and APIs."

In reality these have ALWAYS been copyright, it's just that the originators have either not put any usage terms or placed the work in the Public domain.

Writing up a Computer language specification or API is no different to creating any other new written work.

Actually Zilog used different mnemonics for the common instructions of Z80 with 8080 and 8085 because indeed the 8080 & 8085 mnemonics are (c) Intel.

The reason for whole existence of BSD, GNU (before Linus wrote his Kernel) was in fact a copyright law war between Bell Labs (AT&T) and the Universities over UNIX ownership. Obviously Google has tried to sidestep Java ownership in a more clackhanded manner than GNU and BSD vs AT&T/Bell Labs.

GNU = Gnu is Not Unix

Mines the one with the Z80 handbook in the pocket