&gt; You have a few things ass backwards<p>You may think this is the case and are entitled, of course, to your opinion, but:<p>&gt; with a fundamental lack of technological knowledge on more than a few points (to put it mildly), which is not unusual for lawyers and won&#x27;t be for Oracle either.<p>I am not a lawyer nor work for Oracle (or Google for that matter). Neither have I ever worked for Sun, Oracle or Google. However, I am a software developer and have been one for over twenty years. I have also collaborated with both Oracle and Google on OpenJDK (yes, Google has been collaborating with Oracle on OpenJDK throughout most of the court case, as much of Google&#x27;s infrastructure is built upon OpenJDK).<p>&gt; This is done every other day of the week in the software industry and presents no problem.<p>That&#x27;s news to me, and I am quite familiar with the industry. I am not aware of many more cases where such a wholesale copying (without license compliance) of an API has taken place for reasons <i>other</i> than source&#x2F;binary compatibility. There are a few (UNIX is a famous case, but that&#x27;s been challenged in court already), but none recent. Again, regardless of how ridiculous, laughable or preposterous you think copyright law is, it most certainly does not apply to languages (like SQL or the Java language itself) nor to any other algorithm, protocol or API (as in web APIs) that does not have a fixed representation in text.<p>&gt; I think you need to re-read this back, carefully, and comprehend how utterly idiotic trying to separate &#x27;web&#x27; APIs from &#x27;other&#x27; APIs in terms of copywrite actually is.<p>Again, the matter of whether you think this is idiotic or whether this really is has absolutely no relevance to the law. If I tell you a story it is not copyrightable; if I write the same story down, it is. If I record myself while telling you the story, it is also copyrightable. The same story, serving the same purpose may or may not be copyrighted depending on the very particular form it takes. You may think this is idiotic (although you may be persuaded otherwise if you studied the purpose of copyright vs other forms of legal IP protections), but that&#x27;s how it&#x27;s always been.<p>&gt; I&#x27;m afraid this is yet another piece of laughable misunderstanding and shows how shaky Oracle&#x27;s legal case actually is.<p>I don&#x27;t know if you&#x27;ve noticed, but I&#x27;m not arguing Oracle&#x27;s case. I think there are good arguments to copyright APIs and good arguments against, but I really -- in all honesty -- don&#x27;t have a final opinion on the matter. You think Oracle&#x27;s case is laughable -- fine. My point is that no matter if Oracle is right or wrong, <i>from the perspective of copyright law</i> a ruling on library APIs does not translate to web APIs regardless of how similar or even identical you believe they are. Copyright law is very specific about the forms protected works may take. If a work is a <i>specific, fixed</i> text it <i>may</i> be copyrighted (if it meets some other conditions); if not -- it may not.<p>&gt; This means there is no software industry, and it goes way beyond Google and Oracle.<p>That&#x27;s your opinion. However, the ruling does not apply to any API or protocol that is not recorded in fixed media, and interoperability has been accepted as a fair use defense before. I am not aware that the software industry is predicated on copying and re-implementing significant APIs (not a function here and there, which is definitely fair use) for purposes other than interoperability.<p>&gt; Curiously, using OpenJDK and overriding core APIs with Classpath would also give them a pretty good example as to how ridiculous this whole thing is.<p>Maybe. I know that I and others wanted them to do this before the lawsuit ever happened, because everybody saw it coming (once Sun&#x27;s fate was decided), but Google didn&#x27;t listen. They preferred getting sued (which they had anticipated) over using GPL software.