Regardless of the legal status of APIs, this Phoronix article is about AMD providing a replacement ABI and I wouldn't assume the legal issues are necessarily the same. But because this is a case where AMD is following a software target there's the possibility, if AMD starts to succeed, that NVidia might change their ABI in ways that deliberatly hurt AMD's compatibility efforts in ways that would be much more difficult for APIs or hardware. That's, presumably, why AMD is going forward with their API emulation effort instead.
If you read the article, it's about Google's re-implementation of the Java API and runtime. Thus, yes, Google was providing both API and ABI compatibility.
I read the article when it came out and re-scimmed it just now. My understanding at the time and still was that the legal case revolved around the API and the exhibits entered into evidence I saw were all Java function names with their arguments and things of that sort. And I'm given to understand that the Dalvik Java implementation Google was using with Android was register based rather than than the stack based standard Java, which sounds to me like it would make actual binary compatibility impossible.
