Alsup: "I have done, and still do, a significant amount of programming in other languages. I've written blocks of code like rangeCheck a hundred times before. I could do it, you could do it. The idea that someone would copy that when they could do it themselves just as fast, it was an accident. There's no way you could say that was speeding them along to the marketplace. You're one of the best lawyers in America, how could you even make that kind of argument?"

David Boies (counsel for Oracle): "I want to come back to rangeCheck."

Alsup: "rangeCheck! All it does is make sure the numbers you're inputting are within a range, and gives them some sort of exceptional treatment. That witness, when he said a high school student could do it—"

Probably about the absurdity of being hit with potentially astronomical penalties for "copying" 9 lines of trivial code that's barely worth hitting ctrl-c for.

Obviously, common sense is - as always - distant from the pedantic nature of law and laywers, but just about anyone sane is gonna look at this and go "well that's just stupid".

IIRC, the literal copying of code was something for which the parties stipulated to $0 in damages; the potential liability is about copying the API, not the one trivial 9-line function.