My professor served as Google's expert witness to explain to a jury what the extent of the alleged duplicated code was. Only a handful of methods had identical

My professor served as Google's expert witness to explain to a jury what the extent of the alleged duplicated code was. Only a handful of methods had identical implementations - things like toString() or binary search, and Google argued it was because they'd hired the original programmer, who implemented it the same way twice independently. make no mistake: the case was about whether an API can be copywrited, or whether it's public information like a phone book. as far as I know, Google's implementation was independent.