@Shamar Florian Mueller agrees with you:

"""

Contrary to what many others will say, today's decision is bad news for software developers. We do need certain fair use rights, sure. But overreaching fair use encourages infringement. [ . . . ]‌ if developers didn't have an equitable defense anyway, they should at least have fair use rights. In Oracle v. Google, however, the issue was much more narrow: it was about a new platform using another platform's API code to compete--in fact, displace--the older one.

"""

www.fosspatents.com/2021/04/su…

His analysis seems to say that Google copied more than what was necessary to get the interface definitions, and that doesn't agree with ... my memory of second-hand reports from another decade. I admit I'm not on super solid ground, so we'll see what other analyses will emerge about this.

@clacke Mueller has been reliably wrong about things his entire career so far, why would he change now? ;)

The entirety of the question in court at this point was Google having written a reimplementation that uses the same API names; other than a very brief bit of code that appears to have just happened to be written the same way (was by the *same engineer*!), Oracle's claim of copyright infringement hinged solely on what API compatibility hinges on, ie. using the same names for API methods.

@keithzg Thanks for sorting this out.

@clacke I spent a summer at the height of Oracle v Google working a mall job where most of the time there were no customers and I was just standing in front of a laptop connected to the internet, so a lot of this is seared deeply into my memory :D

@keithzg And you are right about Mueller. I wouldn't say he is consistently wrong, but for this case in particular I have some vague memories about him taking very weird positions early on.

@clacke Yeah at least from what I've seen of him when he pops up in my news and discussion readings, Florian Mueller always seemed like he takes too much delight in being contrarian to actually offer objective analysis, especially about this case where he seems to have staked out some staunchly contrarian positions early on and doggedly stuck to them.

From my reading of things at least, a (or perhaps the) core recurring mistake that Mueller seems to make (or, to be less charitable, perhaps just the tool he uses to arrive at smugly idiosyncratic opinions) is that he reads some odd interpretation into licenses or implications of laws that licensors, licensees, and judiciaries all haven't hitherto seen or believed and then concludes this is some big gotcha that's gonna blow up at some point. And it never does, because of course the law isn't some immutable thing outside of all society that one can find some hack in the matrix for; it's *made up of* that interplay of participants and legal practices!

The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that perhaps because he's not coming from a Common Law jurisdiction like the U.S. he's not really groking how important precedent is in American law, but then maybe he shouldn't be so stridently opining on it ;) And from my (admittedly basic) understanding of German law it's not actually markedly more open to big "gotchas!" that change the meaning of a contract despite all parties involved actually having a demonstrably different interpretation historically . . .

@keithzg In my impression civil law jurisdictions like Germany or Sweden are less susceptible to gotchas and tend to interpret contracts and licenses as "do what I mean, not what I say", whereas common law jurisdictions try to be more of an objective law execution engine that looks at the letter of the text.

Maybe if he is coming from a civil law perspective he looks at the US law as more mechanistic than it really is. Common law still requires a lot of human judgement, as we can see in the differing outcomes for this case at different levels, and US law has many provisions for "I know it when I see it" classifications on what's a derivative, what's sufficiently original, what's fair, etc.