Oracle isn't shooting themselves in the foot (now). Today they have the money required to pay lawyers to put on a vigorous fair use defense of any potential API

Oracle isn't shooting themselves in the foot (now). Today they have the money required to pay lawyers to put on a vigorous fair use defense of any potential API copyright infringements. Of course, back in the late 1970s when Oracle was just starting out by building a database based on a query language developed at IBM it would have been another matter entirely...