Not after this precedent, which says that APIs are free.
What will happen: Intel licensing the i86 instruction set will not be possible from now on, same for ARM.
Patents are what are generally what is used by Intel, etc to protect (and license) new CPU instructions and provide protection for novel ideas/inventions for up to 20 years.
Copyright generally protects specific expressions/implementations of an idea and last up to 95 years for corporate patents, or 70 years + the lifetime of the author for individual patents.
For completeness there is also trademarks which cover names and logos which can last indefinitely, as long as they are in commercial use.
The text of a CPU instruction specification would be covered by copyright, the algorithm for implementing the instruction by a patent, and the branding (ex: MMX) by trademark.
I fail to see why an ISA is fundamentally different than a standard library.
As GP said, the difference is whether it's patented. If Sun had patented parts of the API (or algorithms necessary to implement it), then Oracle would have another weapon against Google even after Google was granted a fair-use defense.
I could understand Intel having a CPU patent for specific CPUs, but an specific ISA?!
A really interesting test case would be to implement an isomorphic encoding to x86 with same instruction widths and what-not such that it's trivial to convert binaries from one to the other, and modify compilers (especially the JIT ones).
No, it doesn't. It says the "fair use" doctrine covers copying an API's "task calling" system, i.e. nomenclature and ontology.