They didn't take it from the public any more than Led Zeppelin took their songs from the public when they sued those who violated their IP rights.
Software has a real and tangible value. Songs ... well, you decide their value, but I don't understand why the value songs create should be protectable, but software not.
That's really what this is about. This is about granting to those who write software the same rights to that property as anyone else who has rights to what they write.
We make things protectable so that private entities can cordon them off from the public so that they can make money from them by selling copies. If we had a different funding arrangement for the arts, such things would certainly be unnecessary. In this case, we can clearly see that privatizing APIs gains the public nothing and Oracle and co. lots of things.
You are a private entity. You can write software. If you do, you should have the same rights as Oracle does on software it owns. Corporations are people and you are people.
Private entities create things of value and share them with an incentive to recover their investment, and then some.
If it's possible for anyone, including private entities like Google, to CTRL-A, CTRL-C, CTRL-V it into their own use, then there is negative incentive to create that kind of value for the world.
Lol, what? You still have copyright over software you write regardless of how this case goes. It's whether you can shut down other people's works just for being compatible with yours that's at stake.
Software has a real and tangible value. Songs ... well, you decide their value, but I don't understand why the value songs create should be protectable, but software not.
That's really what this is about. This is about granting to those who write software the same rights to that property as anyone else who has rights to what they write.