Yes, it's always worth reiterating that the Federal Circuit's decision is precedent nowhere, not even in the Ninth Circuit where the district court is located.

This is one of the reasons why the FSF, for instance, sided with Google but still urged the Supreme Court not to take the case. They said the GPLed OpenJDK already gave Google the right to the APIs in question, but also noted that there wasn't precedent any court needed to defer to for the Supreme Court to address anyways.

I originally wrote "implicit affirmation", but edited it out. Hope you didn't downvote the entire comment because of that.

There's nothing to infer from a denial of a petition for certiorari, and there's certainly no precedential weight to it. And there's actually precedential weight to the fact that a denial has none :)

It is true that they implicitly affirmed the decision in this particular case, but as to the larger question of copyrightability of APIs, as I mention above, the reasoning for denial could just as easily be they didn't think this case would be a good test for that question for whatever reason.

Wikipedia cites a few cases in which the Supreme Court has explicitly stated this in [1] (see paragraph starting with "Conversely...")

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Certiorari#Federal_courts

Nope, I didn't downvote you. I think the rest of what you wrote is pretty accurate. I also don't think Google will capitulate. I think they're moving to OpenJDK to limit their downside, but I think they're doing it with the idea of fighting it out.