Oracle case crippled after judge rules APIs can’t be copyrighted

Am I reading this right? The judge's ruling effectively says it's legal to reverse engineer an API if you treat it as a 'black box' and simply replicate the inputs and outputs?

Jon

No what he said was



The judge seems to be saying that one cannot copyright specific calls to an API (the method) but only the larger program (the implementation) of which that method forms part.

Basically it doesn't matter that part of Google's code is identical to Oracle's because the API only provides one way to accomplish that function.

Also that the Java APIs can't be copyrighted

Nothing stopping MS doing it with the .Net APIs though IIRC (even though it's freely licences for use on Mono it could still be copyright)