Goldstein & Russell's Thomas Goldstein. (Photo: Diego Radzinschi/ALM)

The U.S. Supreme Court has always struggled with the copyrightability of computer command structures, and Tuesday's long-awaited argument in Google v. Oracle about Java application programming interfaces suggested that hasn't changed.

But a few justices sounded pretty confident that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit didn't properly defer to a San Francisco jury that found Google's copying of the APIs a fair use.