@voxette-vk I think you don't need to be a programmer to understand programming well enough to understand Google v. Oracle. And if the Supreme Court couldn't, it was only because it was explained poorly to them.
Programming is just telling a computer to do things. This is a concept that already exists in the human world: recipes, IKEA assembly instructions, LEGO instructions...
The recipe analogy works very well... it's barely even an analogy, it's just exactly what it is. A program is a recipe, except written in a language that a computer understands.
(Recipes are, of course, not copyrightable, but Congress made a special exception for computer programs to be copyrightable, for the economic benefits.)
So Sun made the Java language, and also the Java Virtual Machine (a robot which follows recipes written in the Java language).
What's that Carl Sagan quote? "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe." Recipes to make things from scratch are really complicated. Imagine if you had to write instructions for creating a universe that spawns a solar system that has a planet which supports plant life in such a way that wheat evolves, which can be cultivated, then milled into flour, and then further milled into white flour.
It would be nice if you could instead write "1. Get flour from somewhere". So that's the Java Standard Library. A library is a recipe book for the Java Virtual Machine. The Java Standard Library is a recipe book that the Java Virtual Machine always comes with, with recipes for things like flour, so you can write your recipes safe in knowing that if you say "get flour", the robot will always know what to do.
Google wanted to make a robot that understands Java, too. But to be able to read recipes written for the Java Virtual Machine, it would need to know how to get the same ingredients that people who wrote recipes for Java expect to have available.
So that's what they copied. Not the recipes, which they rewrote from scratch. But simply the list of the names of the ingredients. Only enough to create a robot capable of understanding existing Java code.
At this point, we understand the situation well enough to understand some important points:
• Google took a list of ingredients. Then removed some ingredients that weren't relevant to smartphones, and added others that were. But that's all they took.
• Google did not take "code". Oracle would have you believe that Google stole the words "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2", and "Chapter 3" from their book. The only content Google copied was the list of ingredients. The fact that the list of ingredients was written in the Java language rather than English does not change the fact that it was a list of ingredient names and nothing else.
• Sun's only actual contribution to the list of ingredients is: the choice of what to include, and the names of the ingredients.
• The decision of which ingredients to include or not include is not copyrightable, as stated explicitly by the Supreme Court. Not that it matters, because Google chose to include different ones (including some Sun omitted, and omitting some Sun included).
• Sun did not invent the word "flour". They specifically chose not to use something like MaxPowder™, but rather to use the exact same words every other programming language uses, which come from English words people have used for centuries.
• A list of ingredients a robot knows how to make is, regardless, squarely on the "idea" side of the idea/expression dichotomy central to copyright law, established in Baker v. Selden and later codified in the Copyright Act. The Copyright Act even explicitly states that names are not copyrightable. Even if you argue that there is creativity in making an organizational system, organizational systems are explicitly, in many very clear precedents, established as not being copyrightable.
