Alright; you're now allowed to read and write English, but you can't use any of the words in the Oxford English Dictionary, as they are a copyrighted API.
I'm not a lawyer so I don't know if Google's case is solid legally, but putting myself as a juror the Oracle opening statement I think would be very convincing compared to Google's.
But my reading of the slides is probably colored though by my personal opinion that the Java API should be copyrightable. It's a substantial creative work and no two people would create the same APIs even containing the same ideas and concepts (.NET for example).
- Microsoft should be able to shut-down clean-room re-implementations of Windows? Like WINE and Sun's Wabi?
- IBM should have been able to crush Compaq over their reverse-engineered BIOS?
- Digital Research should have been able to crush Microsoft for including system calls that enabled CP/M compatibility for some programs in DOS?
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