Bugs are a red-herring to the discussion. Bugs doesn't get you out of copying. The question is: did you copy or not? Google argued "we certainly did copy but APIs can't be copyrighted." Which was not the law at the time they did the copying and is not the law now .
Except it is the law now and then that APIs aren't copyrightable according to the court that's generally supposed to handle such things, in this instance The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. They've ruled plenty of times on the matter, and have developed decades of case law stating that implementing APIs is totally kosher. Sony v. Bleem is great example. There the appeals court ruled that not only could Bleem ship a PS1 emulator with reverse engineered APIs of the kernel (explicitly as a commercial venture even!), but they could port it to a competitor's game console (the Dreamcast), and use Sony's IP in screenshots.
But, because Oracle v. Google case had an ancillary patent question in an earlier appeal, the appeals are instead going to the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. This court is really only supposed to answer patent questions. The CAFC can't set precedent in these matters, and overwhelmingly defers to the district courts' precedent. Bot for some reason they have chose to ignore all of that this time and make their own, fresh (and super weak) precedent that only applies to copyright cases with patent questions.
Eh, I wouldn't go that far. CAFC judges just tend to be appointed (at least a little) for how much of a hard on they have intellectual property rights in general. The whole circuit was setup pretty much only to do patent appeals for the most part. The judges probably just think of themselves as 'principled'. And they are technically allowed to do this, despite it being kind of a dick move.
>APIs aren't copyrightable according to the court that's generally supposed to handle such things, in this instance The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
That is just not true. According to the well-pleaded complaint rule, the Federal Circuit had jurisdiction.
> According to the well-pleaded complaint rule, the Federal Circuit had jurisdiction.
The Federal Circuit has the right to hear and decide this particular case, but they do not have the right to establish binding precedent on lower courts or other appeals courts in matters of copyright law. This has been explained to you repeatedly.
