[fpgeek]

Other than a pile of legal fees, it's not clear that there will be any direct impact on Android and Google. Even if you assume Google loses all their appeals (a big if - the Federal Circuit and the Supreme Court often don't see eye-to-eye on IP law), Google didn't lose on fair use - the jury deadlocked.

So the issue of fair use would need to be re-tried, and there's a good chance they'd win - the deadlocked jury was 9-3 in favor of Google. That may even be overstating Oracle's support. According to some reports, only one juror was a holdout for Oracle on the fair use question [1].

The problem isn't Google's, it's everyone else's. If this decision holds up on appeal, the legality of a compatible re-implementation of an existing API will often be a question of fair use that needs to go to a jury. Practically speaking, that means API re-implementation (a previously standard, commonly-used part of the interoperability toolbox) is dead for anyone who doesn't have the millions required to try this sort of case. I can't even begin to comprehend how that will change software development.

[1] http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/24/net-us-oracle-goog...

[rayiner]

Obviously, non-copyrightability is the best possible outcome, because then such cases wouldn't even be worth bringing. But the opposite holding doesn't necessarily mean every such case has to go to a jury trial. If the facts are such that no possible jury could find in favor of one party, a fair use question may be disposed of on summary judgment: https://www.eff.org/document/opinion-granting-summary-judgme....

Getting a case to summary judgment isn't cheap, but the fair-use factors aren't super fact intensive: http://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors. They center around the nature of the work itself, which can be described in pleadings, rather than specific facts about the creative process that might require extensive discovery.