Licensing costs are arbitrary. If you want to license some IP from me I can ask for a billion dollar for it. Or I can simply refuse to sell it. The point is that IMO Google or anybody else shouldn't have to ask for permission for cleanly reimplementing an API.

I think some people in this thread are minimizing the issue because they don't like Google but I think it's naive and short-sighted. It's not about Google or Oracle, it's about copyrighting APIs.