Procedural trivia time: the Google vs. Oracle case is about copyrights, but if it weren't for patents it would not be at the Supreme Court.
Originally, Oracle sued for both patent infringement and copyright infringement. When they appealed, the appeal went to the Federal Circuit because of the patent issues, and so the Federal Circuit ended up handling the appeal of both the patent issues and the copyright issues.
If the case been just a copyright case, the appeal would have went to the 9th Circuit.
If it had taken that route, the 9th Circuit would have almost certainly upheld Judge Alsop, and the Supreme Court almost certainly would not have taken an appeal from that.
The Federal Circuit is suppose to apply the precedent of the circuit that the case came from when deciding issues like the copyright issues that are only before the Federal Circuit because they tagged along on a patent case. In this case, that means they were suppose to follow the 9th Circuit precedent.
I think we need to change the way the Federal Circuit works in cases like this. If they decide issues that got there via tag along, I think the appeals path for those issues should be to the circuit whose precedent they are suppose to be following. In this case, that would mean that the copyright issues should go to the 9th Circuit after the Federal Circuit.
The current way can lead to a situation where in a given circuit you can effectively have different laws for X depending on whether or not someone sues you just over X, or over X and patents.
If sued over just X, the law on X is what the circuit court of appeals for your circuit says. If sued over X and patents, the law on X is whatever the Federal Circuit thinks it is. Those can diverge, and then you have the situation that plaintiffs can choose what they want--sue just for X to get their circuit's law, or toss in a throwaway patent claim to get the Federal Circuit's law.