A difficult question about Anvil and copyright (API and doc copyrights?)

Anvil Q&A
1

Background: I am using Anvil to build an app that will make it easier to make online tutorials. The user can create cards. Each card can have components like a youtube video, markdown text, an image and so on.

The description of the tutorial is based on a text file provided by the user where they indicate the kind of cards and content they want. This is then translated by the Anvil app to an online tutorial.

This leads to the following two questions:

  1. When the user describes the card, they have to have terms to indicate the things they want to add. Image(link=…) creates a card with an image and so on. This seems natural, but here is my worry: Is it OK to just copy some of Anvil’s terminology here. TextBox, TextArea, Image etc (and even some of the keyword arguments)? Or is this not OK? Essentially, is there a copyright on the component API terminology? Cue: Google vs. Oracle!

And even more controversially, perhaps:

  1. I also need to provide some documentation of the cards and the terminology used to create cards. If some cards use similar keywords, it is tempting to copy some of Anvil’s docs. Linking is possible, but might be confusing because it is not exactly similar and also much more limited. But copying seems wrong (depending on the license on the docs?). Perhaps copying with attribution is OK, or maybe it should be avoided altogether?
2

Not a lawyer or an Anvil representative, but my two cents: 1 seems fine, but 2 doesn’t. For 2, I’d ask for explicit permission to copy.

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3

Sounds (more than) reasonable. I guess it comes down to the license that Anvil wants to use on the api and the docs. They are very open source friendly (good!), but I also think copying parts of the docs is one step too far.

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