Google guilty of infringement in Oracle trial; future legal headaches loom(ars technica)

Not really. Not unless the jury was made up of morons.

The Jury's job was to decide whether or not Google violated copyright, assuming that APIs are copyright-able.

That's like telling a Jury to decide: Assuming that smiling is copyrightable and Joe smiled first did Tom then violate copyright in this photograph. Safe to say if the Tom is seen smiling then yes he did violate copyright. If the guy was not smiling then it wouldn't make the Jury biased against the photograph, would it?

It doesn't seem like much of a surprise at all. The only surprise was that the Jury was so mixed over it.

It seems very true that Android does use some Java APIs. That was one of the major points behind Android in the first place... Java is very popular in embedded space and thus a lot of developers were already familiar with developing for Android before Android ever came out. In addition Android works by using a Sun Java compiler to create bytecode that is then transformed to a compatible format for Dalvik.

So Google's defense in this case was that they added so much to the API that it was no longer derivative.. that their version constituted fair use. Which seems like a weak argument.

Now the Judge has to decide whether or not APIs are copyrightable.

The Judge was hoping that the Jury would rule 'no' so that he wouldn't have to make a decision. That way he could of left it a gray area in the law that was up to interpretation. Now he has to do a lot of work and a lot of research and it's generally going to be a PITA. So from the Judge's perspective the Jury side of things was a bit of a bust. Now he has to do more work and that is irritating. The only thing worse then that would be to have his decision quickly overturned and then be made to look stupid.

Keep in mind that at this point they are mostly making it up as they go along. Also notice that copyright is unnatural, arbitrary, inherently conflicting, and designed with intentional unknowns and vast gray areas.
There is no basis in reality to go off here and is clearly very subjective.

Lets hope that the Judge will say that APIs are not copyrightable and end this wasteful farce right now.

Otherwise there are all sorts of other fun things to look forward to...

Unix copyrights + Linux + POSIX API
Microsoft copyright + Wine + Win32 API
Device firmwares + Drivers + Linux

And all sorts of fun stuff like that. The sky is the limit. Use a API created by another group? You would have some potential conflicts.