Devil’s advocate here... the method signatures, the layout of the classes, what inherits from what, what bits are private vs public, are all pretty non-trivial. Moreover it’s where a lot of the subjective decision making happens, whereas the actual implementations are straightforward once you know what the method signatures should be.

I don’t necessarily agree with the decision but I can see where they’re coming from.

Triviality isn't the determining factor of what's copyrightable.

Edit: And particularly there's tons of case law that this stuff isn't copyrightable, see Sony v. Bleem, where a company literally wrote an emulator of a PS1, and courts said that was fine. Even to straight up sell as a competing product, and for running on competitors machines.

Edit2: And the otherwise shitty DMCA even has explicit exemptions for software interoperability purposes.

In Sony v. Bleem they used blackbox testing and created their own original code from that. If Google had done the sam they would have been fine.

Because of Java's reflection, a black box approach would have given you the same API names that are being discussed here.

Not necessarily. You don't have to "look" at the reflection.

You do to be API compliant.

Bleem did not copy. An emulator is not necessarily a copy.

I think it's important to remember what copyright is meant to protect -- expressions of ideas. You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. You can't copyright medicine.

There is a bit of a "intellectual property" slippy slope going on here. Whether or not something is useful or non-trivial is inconsequential.

> You can't copyright the structure of an engine in a car. //

You could design an engine to have an artistic structure. What you couldn't then do is stop anyone copying the functional parts of the engine and leaving out the purely artistic elements.

What's reallly non trivial is getting developers to uptake a new APi they are unfamiliar with.

Isn't Java open source? (Does this not include the APIs that are part of it?)

When it comes to Oracle, it doesn't matter. There's a reason MySQL was forked into MariaDB basically the second Oracle bought it.

Open-source does not mean there are no restrictions. AFAIK, Java's open-source license did include some provisions that Google violated.

PS: I am not a lawyer. Above piece of knowledge is coming just from what I read, perhaps on HN during the previous ruling on the case.

OpenJDK is presently under GPL 2, with the "classpath exception" at the end: http://hg.openjdk.java.net/jdk9/jdk9/file/a08cbfc0e4ec/LICEN...

At the time, though, I don't believe it was open source and OpenJDK originated as a cleanroom rewrite of it, and has since been integrated.

I thought Google used the implementations!

I thought one of the main issues was that there was only one natural implementation of many API functions. Like when you assign students a coding question, you will see many answers come back identical even though no one cheated.

Even then, there were only a couple trivial places that saw literal copying. The code that checks for array out of bounds was the main one.

They mostly used Apache Harmony's implementations.