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Presuming the wire-protocol specification contains things like schemas for Protobuf/Avro/etc. data formats (the kind of formats where most compiled-language libraries for them do compile-time code-generation against the schema to create efficient codec modules), it would be very hard to make a conforming implementation that doesn't breach copyright by embedding those schemas byte-for-byte.

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How would making a byte-compatible protobuf by simply looking at the existing one be different than say, creating metric-compatible fonts, or, for example, pretty much exactly what Google did in the Oracle lawsuit? (Copy them verbatim because they shouldn’t be copyrightable...)

Even if you subscribe to the belief that the protobufs are eligible for protection under copyright law, which is fair since it seems to be the current understanding even if it is relatively new, I still don’t understand how creating compatible specs without reversing is illicit. It’s fair use, no? I thought interoperability was a valid claim for fair use.

If you reverse-engineered the protocol (either from scratch, or by looking at existing implementations) and happened to (independently) come up with an identical looking data schema, that would _not_ be protected by copyright.

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