Steinberg VST/ASIO APIs free at last?

From Groklaw - EU Court of Justice: No Copyright on Computer Functionality or Computer Languages ~pj

?

Great website Vinnie!

I was looking for something like that, I was sure there will be one in the Stack Exchange sites (man they have homebrewing/Lego answers/poker sites…)

This is EU only the US has yet to say it’s word: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/05/03/2221216/oracle-vs-google-and-the-right-to-use-apis

generally this court case doesn’t look good for developers.

Hi there, sorry to drudge up this very old topic, but seeing as the Oracle v Google case was just ruled on last month it seems the US supreme court sided with Google that APIs are not copyrightable for “fair use”. Has anyone determined what this means for VST2 (and, even possibly for the FST header)?

Well, the code “behind” the VST2 APIs is Steinberg’s intellectual property, so whatever weird and uneducated judge may rule: Steinberg can remove the support for VST2 from all their products (Cubase, Nuendo, etc.) at any moment.

It is their code - why would you want to keep writing software that uses this very, very old interface, when Steinberg has announced they would stop licensing it for soooo many years already?

Do you really believe that any judge would be able to force Steinberg to keep them supporting some of their own, old and out-dated code?

But they do the opposite: they keep supporting VST2 as host, but no other host shall be created now to support it.

If the API is not protected, the reverse engineered VST implementations would become legal, as I understand it. But IANAL.