[throwawaykf05]

* In this conflict, Oracle wants copyright to cover more things. Google wants it to only cover what it has historically covered. *

This is incorrect. By most reasonable readings of copyright law, API's have always been covered by copyright, unless deny that API design holds any modicum of creative expression. So it's more Google that's trying to reduce the scope of what's protected rather than Oracle trying to expand it.

[btilly]

We can argue what readings are reasonable until the cows come home. But most lawyers had thought this area of copyright law settled. Creative expression is copyrighted. Functional expression is not. In cases like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_v._Accolade, use of copyrighted material where necessary for functional interoperability has been ruled fair use.

See http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1323818 for some of the history about how this came about.

[throwawaykf05]

I am somewhat familiar with the history of these cases, and I would disagree that most lawyers thought it settled because this case is subtly but significantly different. The Sega etc. cases were about binary interoperability, which I'd agree is well-settled law. The thing that most of us programmers get confused about is, APIs are for humans to design systems that interoperate with other systems. They are not necessary for binary interoperability, at least for Java.

To understand what I mean consider this: You can design an API for file handling that looks nothing like the Java API and yet compiles down to exactly the same JVM bytecode. Case in point: Jython and JRuby. It is the byte code level interfaces that cannot be copyrighted because they are purely functional. The human readable Java API on the other hand are just one form of expression of that underlying functionality.