It's why silly (and inadequate) analogies emerge:
"Justice Clarence Thomas compared Google's copying of the Java APIs to a football team taking a rival's playbook."
"Close your honor, but let me expand on this further. Imagine instead that your opponent publishes their calls and they are regularly available to all individuals of the general public. However, while they may describe a call for going long, they do not give any specifics if the receiver starts from the left, center, right side of the field, how fast he should go, who should block for him, etc. They essentially are just assigning a call to a general concept of 'go long'. Now as a competitor team, I look through their publicly available calls and say "Hey, thats a good idea, we should have a call for 'go long' as well". However, in practice my team does start from the left, and then cut in the center of the field to receive the ball. This may, or may not be totally different then what my opponents choose to do when they call "go long" The additional benefit is if I transfer a new coach onto my team, he can use the call "go long" and even though the team accomplishes the goal, possibly by a different route, he can make the call to accomplish essentially the same thing."
Note: Not a huge sports guys, so perhaps my football analogy broke down a bit there, but hopefully you get the idea.
I'd have argued it's more like copyrighting doorknob placement (opposite hinge, at hand height) and operation (twisting) on doors vs. patenting a novel mechanism inside the doorknob.
A football playbook is more like the blueprints of the inside of the doorknob. Of course it's patentable if playbooks are patentable (I presume they are if considered works of choreography as in a dance).
As far as I can see (but please note that I am not even in the US, never mind a legal scholar) the relevant US law is 37 CFR § 202.1 about “Material not subject to copyright” (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/37/202.1). This enumerates several cases that are explicitly excluded from copyright protection. One is “typeface as typeface”, which was apparently interpreted as described above in a litigated case (Eltra Corp. vs. Ringer).
An argument has certainly been made, though I can’t immediately find the original source, that this exclusion is justified because of the utilitarian nature of a typeface design: allowing one party to control all use of it would be against the public interest, because ultimately that principle could allow for all printed communication to become controlled.
It seems to me that APIs fulfil a similar purpose. They are not useful in themselves, lacking a corresponding implementation. They are, however, an essential basis for standardisation, interoperability and communication between practitioners.
Under 202.1(b) of the law cited above, another class of works excluded from copyright protection is “Ideas, plans, methods, systems, or devices, as distinguished from the particular manner in which they are expressed or described in a writing”. I wonder whether a similar argument about the utilitarian nature of APIs as a specification distinct from its implementation could be made based on that.
And that is one of several arguments Oracle made, that api interface is a stencil.
I think I would agree the law supports that argument from what I know about it, copyright is pretty broad. But at the same time, I think that is perverse and we should change the law.
Everybody loses: manufacturers, because they can't easily create competing products, and users, because they have to re-learn driving every time they change car brand.
Such a thing might be considered fair use if the second team's argument was they indeed copied the playbook because they had a recruited some players from the first team and keeping the names the same made it easier for them during practice. But for now the judge is suspicious that they've come up with this explanation after the fact.
It’s more likely the arstechniva writer failed to understand the point of the analogy.
Having just listen to the audio, it really annoyed me that Google’s lawyer kept saying “If we can’t copy this it would be impossible to write software.” And always left of the “in Java” part. Really fucking misleading.