I understand that. I was specifically replying to the assertion that "Google screwed over Sun Microsystems". No, they did not. They decided on a path that they believed was legally defensible and would allow them to do their own thing with Java at lower cost. It might turn out that they're wrong, but no one tried to screw over anyone. It was purely an economic decision.

And if it turns out that Google loses this case, then all sorts of things that we take for granted for interoperability (like WINE, and, before the MS acquisition, Mono) are actually copyright infringement and shouldn't exist. I don't think we can claim with a straight face that WINE or Mono were created with malice intended toward MS, so we should give Google the same courtesy.

I don't think that's "begging the question". Google's corporate counsel determined current law allows for clean room reimplementation, so that's what they did. This was subsequently challenged, and that's where we are now. This isn't a case of Natural Law where the decision is commonsensical -- it's up to the courts to make an evaluation based on other established caselaw (in this case copyright), and there's certainly room for interpretation.

This is a fight over whether Oracle can get existing Supreme Court and Ninth Circuit precedent overturned to make clean room reimplementation no longer legal.