The Supreme Court turned down the opportunity to hear Google's arguments that APIs are not protectable by copyright. Turns out, they are, according to the Supreme Court's implicit affirmation of the Federal Circuit's decision.

But "copyright protection can extend to APIs" is all that the courts' decisions amount to so far. As the article says, the case has been remanded back to the district court, which will be trying to answer the question, "Given that APIs are not inherently unprotected, are Google's actions in this case punishable, or did they amount to fair use?"

Here's how that's gonna go:

Allsup is almost definitely going to find it fair use, and (with a little less certainty) the Federal Circuit is going to reverse that decision when Oracle appeals it. At that point, we're back to waiting to see if the Supreme Court will hear Google's arguments, but this time their argument will be that, APIs being unprotected or not, their actions were essentially no different than the ones the Supreme Court determined were defensible in Lexmark v. Static Control in pursuit of interoperability. First Amendment probably won't actually factor in to this.

This is assuming that neither Oracle nor Google capitulates before it makes it that far. Oracle probably won't. Google might.