Don't go leaving personal diaries on park benches. Especially when legal action has non-trivial chance of exposing the contents as a matter of public record anyway.

And regardless, that is a substantively far cry from how Oracle is trying to employ copyright. The Java API's are no mere diary left on a bench that the evil Google has taken to publish and profit from.

Think of the precedent this would set. You'd open the door to never being able to right the Pair<K.V> API in any form. Oracle owns it. Sorry. You weren't the first to write it.

You'd open up a gold rush scenario. Imagine someone writing a generator, or going and publishing micro-API's doing nothing but squatting on the most logical or attractive signatures, structures, and ergonomics that everyone would converge toward or independently rederive. It'd be like domain squatting, but absolute leagues worse. You'dactively degrade the ability to innovate and write easily readable code all because you wanted to treat an interface as something you should be allowed to lock the rest of the world out of.

That's insane, pure and simple, and makes a mockery of what copyright was intended to actually do.

To go back to your journal on a bench example; I'd be willing to accept a right to protest over the unintended publishing of a creative given the caveat that it not in any way be extended to anything that has to with source material for executable code, or anything that is broadly reducible to math. I even grant this reluctantly, because you're still enshrining the same artistic time bomb if you don't enforce strict, and shorter time limits to the copyright term, or the specific aspects protected by it.

Copyright was intended to incentivize creative work (I.e. the process of doing the creative work) not to create a framework whereby upon compiling a large enough basis of creative works as intellectual property an entity with a sufficiently funded legal department can shut down or render perilous the landscape of creative endeavor simply by virtue of everything having been seen/done in one shape or another before. The legal system, and corporate portfolio's in particular have created a situation where entire generations of people can come and go without being able to reintegrate and iterate on older experiences.

We communicate and perpetuate our understandings, mores, and common experiences in our time on earth through these activities; the risk and cost of freezing out our descendants ability to practice by stripping them of the very giant's shoulders on which we were ourselves placed upon our arrival into the world is real, and even today is fundamentally changing the shape of the field as we are now more than ever concerned with trying to wring as much as possible out of the smallest crumb of similarity.

I'm probably edging into rant territory at this point, but while I recognize valid interest in enforceable copyright your example represents, I cannot accept Oracle's assertion that their Ali's would constitute the same phenomena in kind, or that it is right to have any creative work locked away for a lifetime. The experience, takings away, and derivations of the audiences it influences should hold the same level of sanctity as the original work. Especially if redone independently or utilized in a novel way.