Wow, this is legal bullshiting beyond comprehension. It is the equivalent of one engineer copycating the way another engineer moves his arm when fastening a screw. To give anything beyond 5 minutes attention to this in a court is an insult to society.
Yes, there's a concept in law called "de minimis", short for "de minimis non curat lex": "The law does not care about trivial things". Google argued that rangeCheck was "de minimis".
This article is from 2012. The trial currently happening was remanded from an appeals court, which overruled Judge Alsup in determining that the "structure, sequence, and organization" of the Java APIs (not the code itself) was copyrightable, which is much less de minimis I don't believe rangeCheck itself is still at issue.
I likened it to my architect spouse as copyrighting buildings for having flat walls with door and window sized openings. A win for Oracle would have every construction related company designing doors and windows in proprietary shapes.
