Fwiw, the question here seems to be pretty close to the "API copyright" question currently being litigated in the U.S. as one aspect of the Java/Dalvik lawsuit between Oracle and Google. HN discussions on that point: <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916735" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2916735</a> / <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2996084" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2996084</a>
The author is surprised at the justice's competence, but, by the time someone gets promoted to the ECJ (remember, they go all the way through their undergraduate degree, then through their postgraduate legal training, then maybe some more training, then a placement, then a junior position...etc) they are going to be pretty well read and probably pretty competent too. To top it off, they are totally unaccountable and unbeholden to anyone (ie: it's the EU).<p>In short, you can expect an an international copyright judge in a very senior court to be smart and to do what he feels like.
This should be no surprise. The case was weak. Copyright offers no practical intellectual protection for software. And in this case the software in question was reverse engineered!