The real victory for humanity would be the end of copyright itself. Too much time is wasted on trying to understand and work around this fundamentally broken system.
If we keep relying on copyright, we'll eventually lose everything that makes computers great. Copyright infringement is trivial because we own our machines and have full control over the software that runs on them. Governments and the copyright industry are growing increasingly hostile to the idea that citizens should be able to run whatever software they want. Therefore, maintaining the illusion that information is scarce is fundamentally incompatible with the freedoms envisioned by Stallman's licenses, especially the latest versions.
This API copyright issue also threatens competing free software implementations of proprietary APIs. Projects like Wine should be directly affected by the court's decision.
Look, should a CSS snippet copywriteable? What about a complex SQL query?
Imo, no singular LOC is unique in the way that a newly developed drug is unique or a song is unique. If devs can agree on that, why should that extend to an arbitrarily long combination of LOCs?
Even if it's somehow copyrightable, why should the rights of that LOC extend to the person claiming theirs has been breached? It's a bold claim to say that you are the first dev in the world to have ever created a particular piece of functionality.
Code should be treated like trade secrets - the protection of the creator is in the meticulous seperation of end product from recipe. SaaSs already do this, the entire front end is publicly visible code, which line-for-line, rarely accounts for more than a small % of the backend logic.
That would also bring about an abrupt end of license wars of permissive vs. copyleft, I suppose.