Copyright and fair use is a nuanced balance between giving copyright owners the ability to restrict the actions of the rest of society and encouraging the creation of works that will more than balance out the onerous restrictions undertaken. A situation not all of us even agree on.

The class of actions classified as fair use describe situations where arguably society can loosen the reigns to substantial benefit to society without destroying the incentive to create.

A classic example would be quoting books to discuss them. The free exchange of ideas greatly enriches society while encouraging not replacing readership.

Reducing it to an analogy to physical property obscures instead of enlightens because it misses all the ways a copyright is different than a right to physical property.

> So if Java had just bloated their code and those apis code footprint represented a larger % of the overall they’d be guilty?

Under the fair use doctrine, maybe. Fair use in the US is literally about being able to use "limited" parts of a copyrighted work without getting permission from the copyright holder. What is "limited"? It depends, but 0.4% could reasonably be called limited.

> It seems to me the judge is saying, “the house was full of 10 tons of jewelry but the robbers only took 10 pounds so that isn’t really stealing lol “

Copyright and fair use apply to the creative substance of the work (in your example, the design on the jewelry, perhaps), not to physical instances of it (the actual pieces of jewelry in the house).

More like 10 million pages of books, Reading 10K pages does not mean one stole all the knowledge.

I think this part here is important regarding your interpretation — it‘s not just about loc

> 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.

Now the jewelry stores will have to become smaller so that there will be 1-2 jewels per store. When something gets stolen, it'll be 50-100%.

Who is this "Java" you're personifying?

Perhaps the measurement should have been a count of bytecode instructions rather than lines of code.