>From a plain reading of copyright law it's obvious APIs far smaller and simpler than Java should fall under copyright.
You do realize that copyrighting APIs is functionally useless? There are ways of copying APIs that do not violate copyright. Reinvention is still possible precisely because of things like javadoc or the fact that Oracle doesn't have copyright ownership of code that uses the Java API. There is an endless list of loopholes that this protection is useless.
>The idea APIs don't is a convenient consensus-quo for the software industry that benefits competition and should probably be preserved, although there is the counterbalancing factor that the non-protectability of APIs probably has invisible side effects we can't see (e.g. under-investment in API design).
It has more to do with the fact that we already have patent law that was explicitly created for cases like these. Two inventors build the exact same thing. The first inventor should have the rights to the invention.
>But the Supreme Court won't or shouldn't care about any of that because it's a political debate. The question before them is about what the current law says, and on that, Oracle probably have a point.
Can you point me to software patents that protect the Java API?
>Also, it's going to be even more fashionable to hate on Oracle if they do win, but the current situation has always been legally fragile.
Clean room designs are the status quo in the hardware world. There is zero fragility. It's done all the time.
>Sooner or later someone would have observed the apparent skew between the software industry's approach to copyright and what the law really says.
They already did so to the point that patents have existed before copyright.