> That said, this case does establish a precedent that if your copying of an API is primarily for purposes of matching an interface so that developers can reimplement it, you're in fair use territory:

>> Google copied these lines not because of their creativity or beauty but because they would allow programmers to bring their skills to a new smartphone computing environment.

It's even weaker than you think. It was important that Google's use of Java's API was on a non-competing product. It's still quite up in the air what happens if you provide a generic library using your competitor's API without licensing it from them.