Google won out over Oracle in the end but it took a long time — from 2012 until 2016; four years of court cases — with some courts finding that API structures were copyrightable and others found that they were not, or that reimplementation was fair use. I guess we now have a precedent thanks to this but it could still be an issue? IANAL so I don’t know.
Somebody speculated that the lawsuit was used by Oracle to establish firm boundaries in what can be considered a copyright infringement, with the intent to implement Amazon/GCE APIs for drop-in compatibility for their cloud offering. So they tried all kinds of ridiculous stuff to see what works/what doesn't in order to properly cover their backs while "stealing" other APIs.
Given that Google helped sink Sun by ripping them off, and Sun wasn't in the position to pay for lawyers, to apply the same medicine that they did to Microsoft....
Google won out over Oracle in the end but it took a long time — from 2012 until 2016; four years of court cases — with some courts finding that API structures were copyrightable and others found that they were not, or that reimplementation was fair use. I guess we now have a precedent thanks to this but it could still be an issue? IANAL so I don’t know.