So did Huffman encoding. So did the Laplace transform. So did quicksort, red-black trees, and hell, even the Universal Turing Machine. These are all the result of many hours of creative endeavor, yet they are none of them copyrightable.
This is the same thing that makes Wolfram's claims of ownership of the existence of a proof of Rule 110 CAs as universal calculators particularly onerous.
I gladly accept grellas's arguments. But your examples are ideas, which would fall under patents, not copyright. Source code does fall under copyright, so we need reasoning to explain why APIs - which are a part of source code - do not.
So did Huffman encoding. So did the Laplace transform. So did quicksort, red-black trees, and hell, even the Universal Turing Machine. These are all the result of many hours of creative endeavor, yet they are none of them copyrightable.
This is the same thing that makes Wolfram's claims of ownership of the existence of a proof of Rule 110 CAs as universal calculators particularly onerous.